Double Delight

by Joyce Carol Oates

Holly Mae laughed, as if scandalized. Despite her various ailments (apart from her back injury, and asthma, she complained of inflammations of her joints, and an occasional “spinning head”) Holly Mae was looking robust, with plump reddened cheeks and brassy curls ringing her head like a gilt crown. “Cap’n-Uncle, for shame.” She shook her forefinger in his direction as if he were a naughty old boy.

  Chick, toothpick in his mouth, suddenly shoved back his chair and stomped out of the room. Evidently the big blond boy’s feelings had been hurt—Terence, comparing him with Aaron, marveled at his sensitivity. In an exasperated voice, Ava-Rose said, “Oh, what is this all about? The twins going off, overnight? I thought we’d all agreed—they’re twelve years old, my goodness. When I was that age—”

  “When I was—!” Holly Mae was laughing so, she had to wipe her eyes on the edge of her apron.

  Terence looked from one Renfrew to another, baffled. Seeing how out of embarrassment, or anger, Ava-Rose avoided his eye, he thought for the first time that it might be her own family, loving, and yet suffocating, from whom Ava-Rose Renfrew might be rescued.

  By whom?—by a lover who would sacrifice everything, for her.

  But Terence had no time to pursue this insight, for, stomping as heavily back into the dining room as he’d stomped out, Chick, a vengeful shine to his eyes, returned, tossing down, in triumph, on the table in front of Terence, an item that was distressingly familiar—Terence’s lost Gucci attaché case.

  A painful silence.

  Recalling that moment afterward—the missing attaché case flung down amid the dirtied dinner plates, the initials TCG gleaming as if in mockery—Terence could scarcely remember his response. Perhaps, as in a crisis of metaphysical paralysis, he’d had none?

  He stood baffled, speechless. Sensing how the glowering boy with the toothpick in his mouth had brought the attaché case out less for Terence’s benefit than as a taunt to the elder Renfrews.

  Chick said, boldly, “Look familiar, Doctor? We been keeping it for you.”

  “Safekeeping,” Cap’n-Uncle said quickly.

  And Holly Mae, who’d seemed to have had the breath knocked out of her, recovered sufficiently to mumble, “Why yes—safekeeping.” She then turned to Ava-Rose, who seemed utterly perplexed, saying in a loud, exclamatory voice, “Ava-Rose, hon, you don’t know a thing about this: how, some time before we made Dr. Greene’s actual acquaintance, not even knowing his name, we’d discovered this briefcase that he’d lost, in a restaurant by the courthouse. Oh, the days of that trial! No wonder we weren’t thinking straight! We found it, and—” Holly Mae paused, frowning. She pressed a hand against her heaving bosom. “—and brought it back home, and just plumb forgot it. Till tonight.”

  Chick protested, “Till I remembered, Auntie! Noner you.”

  Terence picked up the attaché case, for he saw it was expected of him. How chill, the smooth gleaming leather—as if the case had been stored in some unheated closet or cubbyhole, of which the big old ramshackle house had many. It was shockingly empty—the applications, documents, letters gone. What does it matter, they were worthless. “Why, thank you,” Terence managed to say. “I—it’s—yes, this is it. A birthday gift from—a family member.”

  Ava-Rose was so stymied by all this, and so exasperated by being so stymied, she tried to make a joke of her situation; pouting, “Well! I see I’m the one in the dark, here.” She cast her cousin Chick a furious glance. She turned on her heel to confront Cap’n-Uncle at his end of the table. “I’m going to want some decent explanation, you know—as I’m sure our dear friend Ter-ence does.”

  In the midst of such strain and awkwardness, Cap’n-Uncle Riff retained his patriarchal dignity; managing, even, to drain his glass of stout. He then rose—tall, bulky, yet, for a man in his eighties, surprisingly majestic—and came to Terence, to lay a warm, fatherly hand on Terence’s shoulder. His expression was the alert, enlivened one of a man who is thinking rapidly and purposefully. “Ava-Rose, one day when you were with the district attorney’s people, preparing for the trial, remember?—the three of us had lunch at the Mill Hill Tavern, across from the courthouse, and there, why, we found this briefcase of Dr. Greene’s, where he’d walked off and left it. We didn’t rightly know what to do—couldn’t trust the folks there to give it to him, if he came back looking for it; a leather item like this, ‘Guc-ci,’ what might it cost? One hundred dollars? Two hundred dollars? So, we ran an ad in the Trenton Times classified, saying what we’d found, maybe a week, ten days, was it, Auntie?—and when we didn’t get any response, we just put it away here. For safekeeping. And then forgot.”

  Holly Mae was nodding vigorously. “Just plain forgot.”

  Ava-Rose, hands on her hips, looked from one of her relatives to another. It was clear that she was displeased; yet, there seemed no pressing reason for her to be displeased. Chick, shifting his broad shoulders inside his shirt, seemed particularly uneasy. “Aw, Ava-Rose,” he said, with a sheepish grin, “—you were with the D.A., it was that long ago.”

  Holly Mae said, to Terence, “They have to help you with your testimony, you know, for a trial! Telling the truth isn’t enough for a murderer can walk free if the jury doesn’t believe. A jury—”

  “—is mostly a pack of fools,” Cap’n-Uncle said dismissively.

  Terence was turning the attaché case in his hand, as if it were a part of his body restored to him. “Well, thank you! I’m very”—he felt that curious sensation over his body, like myriad tiny tongues of flame—“grateful.” He laughed, and the others laughed with him, even Ava-Rose.

  Even Darling, hanging upside-down in his handsome brass cage, cackled.

  Don’t grieve, son. Your secret is safe with us.

  She would not make him leave, surely!

  Knowing how he adored her, and so seemingly grateful for all he’d done for her!

  Would she? Could she?

  It was nearing 10:30 P.M., time for Terence Greene to leave Chimney Point, Trenton, and return to 7 Juniper Way, Queenston. The other Renfrews had drifted off and he and Ava-Rose were alone, as before, in the parlor. The wind continued to worry the shingles, shutters, high chimney, and windowpanes of the aged house, and Terence had a sense of a vast snow-swirling space between him and that other home of his of which, in this house, he could scarcely bear to think.

  Perhaps indeed it did not exist. He had dreamt it, invented it.

  Hettie’s boy. Pray he doesn’t take after the father.

  He had not wished to discuss the attaché case, nor even to think of it, and Ava-Rose too showed no inclination to allude to the awkward subject; as, he’d noticed, both charmed and annoyed by such a trait in an adult woman, Ava-Rose so often ceased to think of, or in any case to allude to, crucial matters safely past.

  He was holding, indeed he was stroking, one of her fine-boned warmly dry hands. She had been telling him—he’d asked her—of certain of the beliefs of the Church of the Holy Apocalypse, though really, at this time, he did not care to know I love you, I adore you, I want to make love to you: you must not send me away, again of such quaint, curious, primitive, New Age-fatalist notions, even in Ava-Rose’s husky, seductive voice. (“It is written in the Book of the Millennium, ‘All things are possible, for all things are ordained.’”)

  Terence shivered, but had to laugh. How calmly this beautiful young woman uttered paradoxes of logic, refutations of ethics, sweeping erasures of sanity itself, like so many “religious” people of our time, as if she not only accepted such paradoxes, but embraced them joyously. And seeing Terence laugh, she mistook his laughter as an expression of that joy.

  The Church of the Holy Apocalypse. Was America of the 1990s itself the Church of the Holy Apocalypse, exulting in the possibilities of its own collapse?

  Ava-Rose clasped Terence’s hand in both her own, smiling happily at him. “You are beginning to understand, Terence, aren’t you? You are not really an ‘agnostic,’ as you’ve said.”

  “Maybe.” Ter
ence would no more have argued with Ava-Rose than he would argue, any longer, with the way Aaron wore his hair, the way Kim shifted her gaze about as she lied, the way poor Cindy made a fetish of weighing herself three times a day. The way Phyllis berated him for not loving her even as, half-consciously, she pushed him from her.

  Terence asked, unexpectedly, “Ava-Rose, is there another man, or men, in your life?” He knew that there could not be, for he kept careful tabs on her time; but he wanted to be reassured.

  And indeed Ava-Rose protested, “Of course not, Terence! How can you ask?”

  “You’ve never been married, you said?”

  Pettishly, yet provocatively, Ava-Rose drew her hands away from Terence’s hand. “If ever I’d been married, even in a secular ceremony, I would cling to my husband all the days of my life. Even if he abandoned me.”

  It was a cruel remark. Yet the sting of it heightened Terence’s desire.

  “About T. W. Binder—” Terence began.

  “Oh, him!—he’s dead.”

  Terence stared at Ava-Rose, who had spoken quickly, as if carelessly. “He’s—what?”

  Ava-Rose detached an oversized silver barrette from her hair, and one of the thick braids fell loose. She seemed composed; yet her eyelids trembled. Terence had half-consciously noted, over the past several months how, as Cap’n-Uncle tugged at his beard when he intended to be funny, or spoke hyperbolically, so too did Ava-Rose fuss with her hair when she believed she might have misspoken. At such times, she seemed to Terence exquisitely beautiful, vulnerable.

  He had to will himself not to become distracted. He asked, “T. W. Binder is dead?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’ve heard, so.”

  “But I thought the man was in prison?—up at Rahway?”

  Ava-Rose bit at the end of her braid, like a girl; raising her eyes to Terence as if in mild incredulity, that he should be so dull-witted. “Men do die in prison, Ter-ence, don’t you think?”

  “But—how?”

  “Why, I don’t know. I’m not even sure that—it’s so.” Ava-Rose frowned, thoughtfully. “Many things are just rumors, in Chimney Point.”

  “If T. W. Binder is dead, he didn’t die from natural causes, did he?”

  “‘All that happens is Nature, for there is nothing not-Nature.’”

  “Ava-Rose, who said that?”

  “It is written in—”

  “No, no. Someone wrote it, someone human. No book writes itself.”

  Ava-Rose undid her other braids, bracelets chiming. Her face, warmed from the long festive dinner, and from this discussion, had taken on a rosy, slumberous look; Terence moved nearer to her, so that, as if half consciously, she took a step backward.

  And then another.

  Snow swirled dreamily against the windowpanes. On Ava-Rose’s worktable, folded garments and pieces of fabric lay like sleeping figures. The saucer of blue sequins winked lewdly in the lamplight.

  “Ava-Rose, darling, when did T. W. Binder die?”

  “As I said, Ter-ence, I’m really not sure that—”

  “But if the man did die, when was it likely to have been?”

  Ava-Rose laughed, as if exasperated. “Dr. Greene, really! Is this an interrogation?” She paused. Edging gracefully backward, she had pressed against the edge of a massive old sideboard. Terence had a vague impression, without looking closely, that the shelves, behind the glass breakfront, were crammed with purses, handbags, old briefcases and attaché cases—a miscellany of leather goods. Indeed, the house was cluttered with such stray, anonymous, seemingly cast-off items.

  “Ava-Rose, don’t you think I have a right to know?—I’d been worried, that the man would hurt you, somehow. When he got out on parole, or if he asked a friend of his, like Eldrick Gill, to—”

  Ava-Rose interrupted, “Auntie Holly said she’d heard that T.W. died around New Year’s. One of the inmates up there must have done it. I don’t know! Don’t blame me!” Tears glinted angrily in her eyes. “I did not love T.W., and T.W. was not, as you seem to think, my lover. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, forcing yourself in my life, poking about in other people’s business!”

  To Terence’s astonishment, Ava-Rose’s slender hand flashed—she slapped him across the face.

  “What—!” One of her spiky rings must have caught him in the cheek, he felt blood begin to trickle down his chin.

  Then he’d grabbed her and was embracing her, struggling with her. They foundered against the sideboard, and against the wall. There was a sound of breaking glass. Terence buried his feverish face in Ava-Rose’s neck, feeling one of her thick, scratchy, fragrant braids against his mouth. Ava-Rose tried to free her arms, to push at him, claw at him, but Terence held her fast. Never in his life had he felt such desire! such fierce exultation, in desire! He was kissing the squirming woman, pressing himself against her, unheeding how she whimpered in astonishment and pain, and panted, “No! no! Ter-ence, no!”

  He knelt before her, pulling her down, hugging her about the hips. He tugged at her clothes, pushed up the black satin jacket, and tore at the taffeta blouse—what pleasure, hearing it rip, feeling Ava-Rose stiffen in genuine fear. He heard, as from a distance, the woman’s hoarse, panting, pleading voice, “Ter-ence! No! You’re a married man, and not free to love me! Ter-ence—”

  And then all was exquisitely, explosively blank: Terence Greene had stopped listening.

  “All Things Are Possible …”

  “Terry?—what is this?”

  Woken from his reverie his shameless dreamy thoughts of her whom he adored, and of making love to her, which, even in reverie, left him dazed, giddy as a man unaccustomed to drink who has downed several quick glasses of champagne Terence turned startled yet guarded toward Phyllis, who had pushed open his study door without knocking, and had entered the room without being invited.

  The tone of Phyllis’s voice—its sharp soprano raised, quizzical, yet not, at least immediately, accusatory—straightened Terence’s backbone, and forced a genial smile to his lips. It was a weekday in mid-March; nearing eleven o’clock in the evening; Terence had returned home from New York (not from Trenton: He’d visited Trenton the day before) well in time for dinner at seven-thirty with Phyllis, Kim, Cindy, and Mrs. Winston, who was visiting for the week. The meal had passed pleasantly if, on Terence’s side, a bit blankly, and Terence had been under the impression that he and Phyllis were on amicable terms again. After dinner Terence had retreated to his study, and to his desk, where he’d been trying gamely to decipher Quincy Ryder’s negligently hand-scribbled evaluation of a candidate for a Feinemann award, or, at any rate, would be perceived by Phyllis as doing so; fierce in entry, she could not know that Terence had been staring at the same paragraph for how long, how many languorous drugged minutes recalling not only his own explosive sexual pleasure but Ava-Rose’s as well, so sweet, a mere breath, a mere sigh scarcely aware of his surroundings.

  Quickly Terence said, “Yes, Phyllis?” as if it were altogether natural for her to interrupt him at his work, without even the courtesy of knocking. “What is it?”

  Phyllis said, advancing upon him, waving a thin piece of paper in her fingers, “I was going through the accounts, the receipts, looking for something of my own, and”—as Terence continued to smile, steeling himself, thinking he could not be found out, surely, there were no records, no checks made out directly to Ava-Rose Renfrew or to any of the Renfrews, hadn’t he seen to that?—as Phyllis hovered over him—“a Visa slip of my own, and I came across this—this enormous bill—dinner at the Washington Crossing Inn?—back in January? What on earth were you doing there?”

  Terence took the receipt from Phyllis’s fingers, frowning at its carbon copy blurriness, its smudged numerals and guilty backhanded signature: Terence C. Greene. Unmistakable. The bill was for $155.56 including tip. The date was January 12.

  “It is your signature, Terry, isn’t it?” Phyllis asked.

  “It does look like it, yes,” Terence said th
oughtfully.

  Recalling the occasion perfectly: that bright sunny Sunday of the Renfrew twins’ twelfth birthday. Terence treating the Renfrews to a lavish brunch at the historic old inn, Terence beaming with a shy sort of happiness at being the cause of the Renfrews’ happiness. Through the long boisterous meal, Dara and Dana had sat on either side of dashing Dr. Greene, vying for his attention; Ava-Rose had sat across from him, smiling at him, gazing at him with her lovely eyes—what ecstasy! Afterward, in the cloakroom, Ava-Rose had given Terence a quick, furtive kiss on the cheek—“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Ter-ence! This was the nicest surprise-birthday ever!”

  How could he have been so careless as to have used a credit card?—it must have been the day he hadn’t enough cash in his wallet.

  With a harsh, hurt little laugh, Phyllis said, “The name of the restaurant flew up at me, while I was leafing through the accounts. ‘Washington Crossing Inn.’ How many years has it been since we were there?” The question hovered in the air, as Terence continued to study the receipt. “Who were you there with, of all places?”

  These past several months, Terence’s increasingly intimate relations with the Renfrews, and with Cap’n-Uncle Riff above all, had given him a certain style in which to deflect others’ suspicions or accusations. He’d more than once happened to be in the old man’s presence when something Cap’n-Uncle said was challenged—by Holly Mae, for instance; and there was the episode of the mysteriously missing, or stolen, attaché case, which Cap’n-Uncle had explained so tactfully, Terence had felt flattered. He respects my intelligence, Terence had thought.

  Confronted now with the receipt, Terence tugged at his chin, as at an imaginary beard, and said, with an air of surprise, yet not the slightest touch of annoyance, “Phyllis, I’m sure I told you about this. It wasn’t a dinner but a luncheon. A business luncheon. Feinemann business.”

  “In Pennsylvania?” Phyllis’s voice sharpened in doubt.

  Terence glanced up at her mildly. “You must remember, dear, I wasn’t very happy at the inconvenience, but Gordon Laird—the curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Contemporary Art—thought we could compromise between Philadelphia and New York, and meet there. They’d applied for a $600,000 grant at the museum, and—”