Double Delight

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He jammed on the brakes. The man’s body was caught somehow in the bumper, or beneath the wheels; Terence, panicked, not knowing what he did, put the car in reverse, felt the right front wheel pass over the man another time, and again jammed on the brakes—“Oh no oh no oh God no God help me.”

  All was still, now. No further screams or cries. Even the dog’s barking had ceased.

  Terence’s headlights, at an angle, illuminated a lane of coarse gravel and rutted dirt, bounded by tall grasses. There was no movement of any kind except the wind in the grasses. No human figure was visible, or face.

  Terence could not comprehend oh yes he knew: he knew what had happened. Except to know that something had happened. Something was caught yet beneath the wheels of his car—something utterly still now, silent.

  Terence was sitting paralyzed behind the wheel of his car and though his nose was bleeding freshly where he’d bumped it on the wheel the grogginess of the past two or so hours had lifted and in its place was a terrible, chilling lucidity.

  What I have done, I have done. Never to be undone.

  The noble-headed white-bearded Cap’n-Uncle Riff limped to the car, to examine what was caught beneath the wheels; Chick in T-shirt and jeans, his Phillies cap reversed on his head, chewing gum furiously, trotted beside him, as did Buster the dog, his eyes glaring yellow and his moist black lips bared from his glistening teeth. Terence was sick with terror hiding his face in his hands yet peered through his fingers at the old man whose bristly snow-white beard seemed all of a piece, hanging stiffly from his face, and whose bushy white eyebrows arched above grave recessed eyes, oddly smooth, pinkened cheeks. The old man too wore a cap—a navy blue nautical cap, rather smart, with a shiny visor; his clean blue much-laundered work shirt was buttoned to his throat, where flaccid flesh hung, in wattles. The boy Chick was as tall as Cap’n-Uncle Riff though he had a tendency to slouch, as if his hefty, muscular shoulders and arms were heavy. Like his great-uncle, Chick stared at what lay on the ground at his feet, and his expression was as blank, as stunned, as the old man’s. Then Chick took off his baseball cap to fan his face, and whistled—a long, slow, high-pitched but descending whistle.

  Cap’n-Uncle Riff took note of Terence Greene behind the windshield of the car, and came to console him. In his solemn, deep baritone, fixing his eyes on Terence’s, he said, “Don’t grieve, son. Your secret is safe with us.”

  The Lover

  As a pregnant woman may be said to inhabit her pregnancy, as her pregnancy inhabits her, and to understand that, not merely her body, but her very soul is pregnant with a new, unknown, mysterious life, so too the lover is forever conscious even if unconscious of his beloved: whose love he both inhabits, and is inhabited by.

  Waking, or sleeping; in the beloved’s presence, or in the presence of others; bounding up the walk to her house, or, constrained by circumstance, many miles away—it scarcely matters, for the lover defines himself by his love. His happiness springs from his love, and his unhappiness. His dread, his anxiety, his anguish; his anger and frustration; his hope, his joy, his ecstasy. The very expression on his face—

  “Dad-dee, why are you standing there like that, why don’t you bring the tree inside? Why are you smiling so—silly?”

  It was Cindy in the doorway, it was Cindy’s anxious teasing voice, and there was Daddy with the six-foot Christmas tree in the lightly falling snow, his skin warmed, his eyes misting over with a thought of her, an unbidden delicious memory of her, Ava-Rose Renfrew framing his face in her hands kissing him chastely on the lips murmuring how can we thank you? thank you? thank you? for this wonderful Christmas?

  A twin-tree, as fragrantly evergreen, as full-branched, and as tall, for the house at 33 Holyoak, Trenton, as for the house at 7 Juniper Way.

  Yet it was a fact, and this fact was the fact of Terence Greene’s life in his forty-fifth year, that, when he was at home in the one house (in Queenston) he was also, in his thoughts, in the other house (in Trenton); but when, for whatever period of time, an afternoon, overnight, a mere snatched hour or so, he was in that house (in Trenton) he was rarely, in his thoughts, in the other house (in Queenston).

  To inhabit bliss is to be blind.

  She’d taken his hands in hers, gently she’d stroked the backs, the bony knuckles, the long slender fingers, then turning his hands over to examine the palms, concentrating then on the palm of his right hand—so tenderly! Her head bowed, a crystal dove gleaming in her hair, and her fleshy lower lip caught in her teeth as she drew a slow ticklish forefinger across the palm, as reverentially as if she were translating the hieroglyphics of a sacred text—“Oh! Ter-ence! Good news! ‘A vessel that overflows yet has no bottom’: Your life will be long, and fruitful, and happy, and will bring happiness to others.”

  He would have laid his head in her lap, pressed his warm yearning face against the folds of her cheaply shiny crinkled-satin skirt, and the milky, hard-muscled thighs beneath (he assumed milky, like the inside of her forearm: In fact he had yet to see Ava-Rose Renfrew’s thighs), he would have hugged her hips in his arms, Oh love me! never send me away! but he did not dare.

  Though he had killed a man for her sake, however accidentally, their relations were quaintly formal.

  Tender, but formal.

  It had been an accident, hadn’t it.

  Yes, said the Renfrews. Yes you know it was an accident, and no one is to blame. You saw how he’d struck down poor Ava-Rose—“Like the Goddamn Karate Kid,” Chick observed—clearly intending to kill her.

  Even if it wasn’t an accident, exactly, but what the law calls vehicular manslaughter—vehicular homicide?—still, that wicked man had deserved it.

  A nightmare, recurring like ripples that become waves, waves that diminish to ripples, and then suddenly swell to waves again, pulsing and pounding in the brain.

  The mangled broken body caught beneath the shiny grill of the BMW. The dented, blood-smeared bumper. Cracked headlight like a demented eye. He’d felt the car lurch forward out of his control and he’d slammed on the brakes and shifted to reverse and now the car was in control backing over the unresisting body. Terence had not seen yes he’d seen: blood in ribbons streaming from the dead man’s nose, mouth, ears cringing paralyzed behind the wheel whispering “Oh no oh no oh God help me no.”

  Daddy had an accident on the Turnpike, a minor accident. Nose bloodied and his eye bruised, poor Daddy. Cindy had stared at him as if knowing that something terrible, irrevocable had happened to them all but of course she hadn’t known, how could she.

  For it hadn’t been murder, it had been an accident. Terence hadn’t known yes: of course he’d known what he was doing, pressing his foot down on the accelerator as he had.

  And the car leaping away.

  And the scream of incredulity and anguish, dragged down beneath the front wheels.

  The thud! of the body against the front grill and bumper, the sickening thump! of the tire passing over living flesh.

  He’d known, it had been deliberate. Killing that brute son of a bitch who’d dared lay a hand on Ava-Rose.

  Terence had leaned out the opened front door of the car to vomit into the weeds, sobbing and retching. He hadn’t meant, he hadn’t known. His body was wracked with terror as with electric charges. His teeth chattered, tasting of bile.

  Then he was on his feet in the chill night air begging them to call the police, an ambulance, maybe it wasn’t too late?—maybe Eldrick Gill was still breathing?—and Cap’n-Uncle Riff gripped Terence Greene’s shoulders tight and gave him a shake and said sternly, “Son, no police will set foot on this property, as I live and breathe,” and Chick whistled in amazement and resignation, “His brains is leaked out his ears—you’d need a shovel for him, not a stretcher.”

  Holly Mae Loomis had rushed out to give aid to Ava-Rose, lying panting and moaning in the wild rose alongside the driveway. Lifting the poor girl from where she’d fallen, all twisted, Holly Mae had heard the sound of silk tearing and had
thought for a terrible moment it was her niece’s skin being torn.

  At the same time scolding Dara and Dana—“You two! Get back in that house! Don’t you dare come out here! Go away and hide! Do you hear!”

  The little girls stood on the crumbling cement stoop, hugging each other. Crying, “Aunt Ava-Rose?—where are you?”

  All these things, Terence Greene had not known, but known.

  As Buster the mongrel husky-German shepherd whimpered and nudged his moist nose, yearning mouth, against Terence’s hands.

  Terence said, “But I will have to notify the police—I must,” and Ava-Rose said, “No, no! Please! The man is dead, the police can’t bring him back,” so sweetly lucid despite her own bruised face, her dilated eyes, and Terence said, “It isn’t a matter of bringing him back, it’s a matter of the law,” and Ava-Rose said, “The Book of the Millennium tells us ‘When the Rapture is at hand, what of Mankind’s Law?’” and Terence said, trying to maintain his eerie composure, which he seemed to know, at the time, was but a form of hysteria, “But the law of the State of New Jersey, the law of the United States of America!—I must report hitting and killing a man with my car,” and Ava-Rose said stubbornly, “Oh, Ter-ence, why!—when he wanted to kill us,” and Terence beginning to weaken, smelling the crisp fragrance of her hair, seeing her gemlike eyes, the pupils blackly dilated, said, “That isn’t the point, the point is he’s dead,” and Ava-Rose said, like a tired, careless child, “Cap’n-Uncle Riff and Chick will see to him, and we won’t need to know,” and Terence said, “But, Ava-Rose—” and Ava-Rose said, seizing his hands in hers, leaning close, “Then I will tell you why, Ter-ence: Because if the police come to this house another time, if they learn of Eldrick Gill’s death on our property, the city will take custody of Dara and Dana, my sister’s girls she abandoned with me eleven years ago—they’ll be put in a foster home and I won’t be allowed to see them again. Nor Holly Mae, nor Cap’n-Uncle. The family will be destroyed, Dr. Greene, don’t you see?”

  Terence stared at Ava-Rose, helpless. With grief, and with love.

  “Yes. I see.”

  Before Terence drove home to Queenston that night, Cap’n-Uncle Riff conferred with him in private. “I know what it is, son, and what it will be, in the days and weeks, and months, to come. I too killed a man, by accident—a hunting accident—in Borneo, forty years ago.” The elderly man paused, gazing deep into Terence’s eyes, as Terence, hypnotized, gazed into his. “You will learn to live with it, son. Like a wound that heals over. Wait and see.”

  The terrible evening of September 14. What I have done, I have done. Never to be undone.

  “Oh!—it’s you!”

  A blowy January dusk, and had Terence come home at an unexpectedly early hour?—he could not recall when he’d told Phyllis he would be back, or if he’d told her anything specific at all.

  Phyllis looked up startled as Terence blundered into the dim-lit bedroom. She was in her champagne-lace negligee, her bare legs and feet very white, sprawled somewhat gracelessly atop the rumpled bedspread just stubbing a cigarette out in an ashtray (the room was unpleasantly blue with smoke), and was she also replacing the telephone receiver in its white plastic cradle, having heard Terence’s footsteps in the hall? As if to make a joke of it, she said, sniffing, “I wish you wouldn’t barge in like this!—you’re never home, and when you are, you—barge in.” Terence apologized at once; seeing, to his dismay, that Phyllis’s face was puffy and her eyes red from crying.

  “Why, Phyllis—what’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? With me?” She wiped roughly at her nose with the back of her hand. “What about you?—what’s wrong with you?”

  Terence stared at his wife, not knowing how to reply.

  It is my fault, of course. These weeks, months. She knows.

  (Yet, what could Phyllis know? Nothing of Eldrick Gill, surely—no one except the Renfrews, and Terence Greene, knew of him. And the thousands of dollars Terence had spent on the Renfrews, or given them, had been by shrewd indirection taken from certain accounts, converted into checks payable to Terence Greene as Executive Director of the Feinemann Foundation, then converted to U.S. Postal money orders—to Terence’s way of thinking, a foolproof procedure.)

  Terence had just returned from New York (in fact, from Trenton: He’d left his office early to drive to downtown Trenton, for a two-and-a-half-hour conference with Holly Mae Loomis and the lawyer the Renfrews had engaged to represent Holly Mae in her $12 million negligence suit against the Trenton Transit Company) and was gray-faced with fatigue (though inwardly glowing, burnished—for Ava-Rose would surely call him next morning to thank him for his kindness, and to invite him to visit); stricken now with guilt at seeing Phyllis so upset. He tried not to show distaste for the smoke in the air (Ava-Rose was passionate against smoking: furious, the other day, having caught Chick with a pack of cigarettes in his pocket), nor even husbandly surprise and concern that Phyllis had resumed smoking (hadn’t she stopped?—he seemed to think she had). He sat on the edge of the bed and touched Phyllis’s shoulder, saying, “I—hope it’s nothing I’ve done?—that has made you so upset?”

  Phyllis laughed, sitting quickly up, so that Terence’s hand fell away. In the lacy negligee her full, heavy breasts were loose, yet constrained, like ripe fruits in netting; her stomach swelled too, and her hips; Terence had a quick dizzy vision of embracing her, that warm womanly body, burying his face against her breasts, or belly. It had been such a long time.

  “Would that make it any less of what it is—or isn’t?” Phyllis asked, brightly.

  “What?” Terence had no idea what she meant.

  “What what?—have you forgotten what we’re talking about, in the space of a minute?”

  Terence drew breath to speak, but hesitated. Apparently, he had.

  Then he remembered—“I was just asking you, dear, if it had anything to do with me. Your being upset, crying—”

  “And I was asking, would that make it—assuming I am upset, and crying, which, in fact, I am not—would that make it any less significant, whether it had anything to do with you?” Phyllis swung her legs around, and sat up, flush-faced, smiling. “Male vanity! Indeed!”

  Terence said, humbly, “I meant only that, if I were somehow responsible, I might be able to help.”

  Phyllis saw that he was contrite; peering at him, she might have seen that he was very tired. Relenting, she squeezed his hand, as she often squeezed Cindy’s hand, after scolding her. “I’ll be all right, Terry. I’m sure it’s just a—phase. A phase we’re going through.”

  “Your father used to say, ‘Human history is just phases; but God’s history is one single substance.’”

  Phyllis appeared startled. “He did?—Father?”

  Rarely had Terence been comfortable with his ministerial father-in-law, who’d had a habit of frowning at him over half-moon reading glasses, as if unable to place him. Now that Reverend Willard Winston was dead, Terence felt on easier terms with the man.

  He said, “Certainly. I think he was influenced by Hegel.”

  Phyllis drew her negligee more tightly about herself, crossing her arms over her breasts. She did not trust Terence’s remarks about her father, perhaps because she knew that Reverend Winston had not entirely approved of his son-in-law. (But had Terence known, had he sensed?—Phyllis wasn’t certain.) In the lamplight, Phyllis’s slightly swollen eyes and hurt mouth gave her a childlike, vulnerable look; there was something melancholic about her very posture. Her blond-frosted hair, usually stiff as a helmet, was flattened on one side of her head. Terence gazed at her, but saw instead his Botticelli Venus: the fine-lashed eyes gleaming amber-green, the slightly snubbed nose, perfect mouth. Even the near-invisible scars, delicate as sparrows’ prints in the snow, seemed to the lover exquisite.

  Phyllis blew her nose in a pink tissue. “Well. At least you are home.”

  Terence loosened his tie. He could no longer bear his tight-fitting Italian shoe-boots, and tugged
them off. What bliss, suddenly! He seemed to know that, though it was a weekday, and the weather frigid, he and Phyllis were expected somewhere for dinner; but he did not dare ask. The previous weekend, Terence had attended a three-day conference in Atlanta (in fact, Terence had attended only the first day of the conference, had flown back early and spent the remainder of the weekend in Chimney Point—that Sunday, January 12, had been Dara’s and Dana’s twelfth birthday); next weekend, Terence was to visit the palatial estate of Nelson Feinemann’s son’s widow, in Rhinebeck, New York (in fact, the visit was planned for Saturday only: on Sunday, Terence was to be in Trenton, with the Renfrews). Guilty, excited, Terence said, “Phyllis, I’m sorry for my part in this ‘phase,’ as you call it. I think you’re right. I—” Not sorry in the slightest. The soul exults in its secret glory. “—I’ll try to be home more, to see more of you and Kim and Cindy. And keep in closer contact with Aaron. It’s a difficult time of year at the Foundation—after the holiday lull, everything begins to accelerate. And—”

  Phyllis said, quickly, “Yes, and at Queenston Opportunities, too. Since my wonderful victory with Matt—of course, he did it, really: The man is so charismatic—I’ve had almost more clients than I can handle.”

  “—and the pressure on me, it’s astounding, to swing grants in the direction of friends of friends, connections—”

  “—and my assistant Trudy is quitting, so abruptly—”

  “—the social life here in Queenston, on top of everything else, is really, sometimes—”

  “—the fund-raiser for the Queenston Medical Center, in March—if I can just get through that—”

  The telephone rang. Phyllis reached for the receiver quickly, raised it, and broke the connection—“Let’s not be interrupted now.”

  Terence agreed. There was no one in the world from whom he expected, or desired, a call: Ava-Rose Renfrew would never call him at home.

  Though sometimes Terence, in the privacy of his study, if it was not too late in the evening (the Renfrews, Ava-Rose included, were usually in bed by 10:30 P.M.), quietly telephoned her.