Double Delight

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Excuse me, Dr. Greene—?”

  “Oh yes, Thelma. Sorry.” Somehow, he’d forgotten her. He was examining his opened right hand, the outstretched fingers, which trembled slightly. There was nothing in his hand, nor even the trace of a stain.

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you, but there’s a young woman who insists upon seeing you. A ‘Miss Renfrew.’ ‘Ava Renfrew,’ she says. I advised her to make an appointment, but—”

  Terence looked up squinting. His facial muscles twitched. “Who did you say, Thelma? Who?”

  Mrs. Riddle consulted a pink slip in her fingers. “‘Ava Renfrew’—that’s all the identification she gave. I explained how busy you are, and if she’s an applicant for a fellowship it wouldn’t do any good, anyhow, to see you in person.”

  Terence was on his feet, and running his hands swiftly through his hair. His heart was racing. “Show her in, Thelma. Please!”

  “Right away, Dr. Greene?” Mrs. Riddle frowned doubtfully.

  “Right away, for God’s sake yes!”

  So she’d come to him after all. To him! to him! so he might forgive her! take her in his arms, and kiss her, tenderly! his blood gloating in sexual triumph!

  “Ava-Rose, my darling—what has happened to you?”

  It was one of the great shocks of Terence Greene’s life: that, as he extended his hands to Ava-Rose Renfrew as she stepped into his office, he saw how severely she’d changed; how, within less than six weeks, she’d aged.

  Her delicate beauty had faded, marred by a sallow, roughened skin and a deeply lined forehead. The lovely amber-green eyes seemed smaller, and had lost their lustre. Her hair, once so striking, was no longer springy and electric but a limp beige-brown, cut short, and brushed neatly behind her ears. The snubbed nose, the sensuous mouth, the high-held head—these were unchanged, yet had lost their vibrancy. And how unimaginative her clothes: a dull-blue dress of some material so synthetic it had no texture, a single strand of bulbous, too-white pearls, the usual black ballerina flats, worn with no stockings. Her fingers, without rings, looked naked.

  Terence was flooded with guilt and remorse. “My God, you’ve suffered, too!”

  He would have embraced this young woman; but, with a deft movement, she shoved him back, using the heel of her hand. She was lithe and quick as a snake, and stronger than she appeared.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, ‘Dr. Greene,’” she said, with a look of embarrassed disdain, “—I’m not ‘Ava Rose,’ I’m ‘Ava-Grace.’ Didn’t your secretary tell you?” Her voice was the hoarse, throaty, seductive one Terence adored, but her words were incomprehensible.

  “What? Who?”

  Terence stared at the young woman, astonished.

  “I’m Ava-Grace Renfrew, her sister. I’m not surprised, she told you nothing about me.” She put out her hand for Terence to shake: Her grip was cool, dry, and brusque. “May I have a seat?”

  “You are—Ava-Rose’s sister?”

  “Her twin.”

  “Her twin—!” Terence stared, appalled.

  “Don’t look so shocked, this is us, I am us, and she is—God knows how she does it—something else.” The woman laughed at Terence’s distress. “May I have a seat, Doctor?—I won’t stay long.”

  Terence mumbled yes of course, of course, and groped his way to his own chair, behind the gleaming expanse of his desk. He could feel the floor tilt beneath him. The thought came to him that it was an appropriate time for an earthquake; but an embarrassment, that Ava-Rose’s sister should see Terence Greene so helpless.

  Ava-Grace Renfrew had noticed no tilting floor, and sat straight-backed facing him, in the pert, prim posture of Ava-Rose, her chin uplifted. In Ava-Rose, the gesture was boldly flirtatious; in Ava-Grace, it was subtly belligerent. Ava-Rose’s sweetly seductive smile had become, in Ava-Grace, an ironic, even angry smile. For Terence’s reaction to her had not been flattering. “I suppose it is a shock, Doctor, seeing me,” Ava-Grace said, not very sympathetically, “—when you were expecting to see her.”

  Terence managed to murmur, gallantly, that he hadn’t been expecting to see Ava-Rose, really—“We’ve been out of contact since June.” He saw that Ava-Grace was nodding impatiently, and so surmised that she knew about this. An unreasonable horror washed over him: Did the woman know all?

  “Yes, I don’t doubt it’s a shock, for you”—Ava-Grace Renfrew made so airily contemptuous a gesture, Terence understood that you was generic, collective, referring to a vast horde of fools, “—to meet the identical twin sister of Ava-Rose Renfrew, and to have a hint of what she really is.”

  Terence tried to keep the disbelief from his voice. “You are, actually—identical twins?”

  Ava-Grace laughed. Though without mirth. Her smile flashed like a blade. “In fact, Ava-Rose was born thirty-six minutes before me. And that was the last time, to my knowledge, Ava-Rose ever did anything more mature than I’d done.” Her eyes narrowed meanly. “Thirty-seven years ago this past June.”

  “Thirty-seven—?”

  “Thirty-seven years ago, we were born, in Sheenville, West Virginia. Our mother ran off with our father—who was not her husband, it’s said—and the two of them lived up along the coast, in Maryland, and Delaware; he dumped her, and she came up to Trenton, and stayed.” Ava-Grace recited these facts with a grim sort of relish. “I don’t remember a thing, and neither does Ava-Rose, it was all so awful. I mean it was degrading, it wasn’t ‘romantic.’ We had lots of ‘Daddys’ over the years.” Terence listened, fascinated. He saw now how the beauty of the one sister had in a way congealed to the sallow, sullen attractiveness of the other; Ava-Grace was Ava-Rose, her features subtly altered. The husky, scratchy voice, so unexpectedly low, was identical, except Ava-Rose’s typical speech rhythm was slower, more languid, than Ava-Grace’s. Even the minute scars on Ava-Rose’s face, so like dimples, or birds’ prints in snow, were mimicked in nicks and blemishes on Ava-Grace’s more coarsened skin. Her complexion had a harsh pewter sheen, as if scrubbed with steel wool.

  “—heard about you from the twins, and, though I detest people who intrude in others’ business, I always make it a policy to speak with Ava-Rose’s ‘man friends,’ if I can get to them in time. Of course, I’ve severed all relations with my sister. And she with me. I had many times broken with them, and stayed away from them, before the final, absolute break.” Ava-Grace paused, looking bemusedly at Terence. She was becoming, by degrees, more sympathetic; not friendly, and certainly not warm, as, virtually in an instant, with her quick dazzling smile, Ava-Rose was capable of exuding warmth; but less belligerent. There began to emerge, like a tiny moon at the horizon, a tone of pity.

  “If you can get to them—‘in time’?” Terence asked.

  “Even so, it doesn’t always do much good. Just like today, with you, I once made the trip, by bus, from Jersey City, where I’ve been living for the past six years, to this damned ol’ city—I hate New York, I do!—to warn another of you, Mr. Bunsen was his name, y’know him?—‘Randolph Bunsen’?—owned a jewelry store, and a real nice one?—well, anyway, I made the trip, expenses my own, and had a nice serious chat with the old fool, and a hell of a lot of good it did, in the end.” Ava-Grace shook her head, laughing; she reached into her handbag, which was singularly ugly, made of scuffed black imitation leather, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Y’mind?” she asked, even as, without waiting for Terence’s reply, she extracted a cigarette and lit it with a tin-looking lighter that resembled (unless Terence was imagining it?) a snub-nosed revolver.

  “What do you mean—‘in the end’? What happened to him?”

  Ava-Grace shrugged impatiently. Twin streams of smoke descended from her nostrils and curved away. Her tone was irascible and conversational, uncannily like Ava-Rose’s in its rhythms—“Oh! and that even more pathetic case two or three years ago!—where, it turned out, his family was all begging him to come back home, and he’d stolen money from his own father—‘Wineapple.’” Ava-Grace curled her u
pper lip in a gesture of contempt. “You can’t help feeling sorry for the family that’s left behind, however it’s hard to feel sorry for the blind ol’ fool.”

  Terence asked quickly, “‘Ezra Wineapple’—? What happened to him?”

  “Didn’t you read about it in the Jersey papers, Doctor? Gosh-sake, isn’t that where you live?”

  Terence murmured apologetically that he read only The New York Times.

  “And this ‘Queenston’ where the twins told me you live—isn’t it close to Trenton?”

  Terence assented, with some embarrassment.

  He said, “In fact, I did intend to look up ‘Wineapple’ in back issues of the Trenton Times, but—for some reason—I never did. I—” His voice trailed off, feebly. Obviously he had not wanted to learn of Ezra Wineapple’s fate. He had avoided learning of it for a year.

  Ava-Grace Renfrew continued to speak in her chatty, vehement manner, as if she and Terence Greene were old acquaintances; intimates united in a campaign of some kind, with a powerful righteous undertone. Of Wineapple she said, relenting, “Well!—maybe I’m wrong, Doctor. It was a terrible scandalous thing and a tragedy for the Wineapple family but maybe, since it didn’t go to trial, there wasn’t all that much about it in the news.”

  Terence asked hesitantly, “I assume the man—died?”

  “Now I recall,” Ava-Grace said, musing, “—his picture in the paper. Front page of the Trenton Times. And the caption beneath—NUDE BODY OF COUNTY OFFICIAL PULLED FROM RIVER.”

  Terence shuddered. “I see.”

  “Just a regular-looking ol’ fella, with glasses, fifty-three years old, had a pretty good job in the County Assessor’s office; losing his hair, but not bad-looking; a sort of hopefulness in his eye—the way a man that age will look, taken unawares.” Ava-Grace laughed, sighing. She’d been fouling the air with her cigarette and now made a desultory gesture of waving smoke away. “That hopefulness—that’s the sad thing, I think. ‘The kingdom of God is within’ but the blind will not see!”

  The transition to a religious perspective was too abrupt for, Terence. He sensed, in this fierce twin of Ava-Rose’s, a similar impulse toward dogma; he did not want the conversation to swerve away from poor Wineapple, floating nude in the Delaware River. “What exactly happened to Ezra Wine-apple?” he asked.

  “Oh, Lord!—who knows? As much untangle a ball of string that’s all snarled, as sort out what really happened, from what they claim happened, in anything the Renfrews do!” Ava-Grace said. Her amber-green eyes narrowed, with angry disapproval. “Seems this Mr. Wineapple met Ava-Rose somehow, I believe it was through some ol’ lawsuit the family was trying out—this thing with Holly Mae, y’know, that you are helping them with, sure isn’t the first of its kind—and shortly afterward the man is in love with her, he gives her presents, even a car; helps with the mortgage on the house. One day Ava-Rose tells him she’s pregnant—he’s the father, of course!—and she’s too ‘moral’ to have an abortion but she does have a miscarriage, by accident—so there’s lots of doctor bills, prescription bills—he’s anxious to pay. (One of Ava-Rose’s boyfriends is a doctor down in Camden, barred from practicing medicine but they’d cook things up together. You ever heard of ‘Dr. Pyles’? No?) However it went, I don’t know. It makes me sick to know such things. I’m proud, in fact, I don’t know half of what goes on at 33 Holyoak.”

  Terence asked, grimly, “But just what happened to Mr. Wineapple, that he wound up nude in the river, dead?”

  Ava-Grace ran a hand through her hair, and fingered a tendril at the nape of her neck. Terence was reminded, so keenly it made his heart ache, of the childlike yet seductive way Ava-Rose fussed, stroked, and plaited her own hair. “Exactly for sure, I don’t know,” Ava-Grace said, with the air of one making an admission, “—any more than the police did. They’d all gone swimming in the river one night, and he, poor ol’ Wineapple, couldn’t keep up, and drowned. He’d been drinking, too. Some sort of party, Fourth of July, I believe. Ava-Rose and Chick and Holly Mae (you’d be surprised, that woman can swim, sort of—float on her back and kick her feet like crazy) and Cap’n-Uncle Riff (he can swim as good as any man half his age), but also one of Ava-Rose’s boyfriends, a mean ol’ biker, that she’d been passing off, to Wineapple, as a cousin. All along the three of them went around together, and poor ol’ Wineapple, such a fool, never guessed what was up. Why, he’d even lent the boyfriend money.”

  Terence murmured, almost inaudibly, “T. W. Binder!”

  “So maybe they owed him too much money, or he was beginning to want too much in return, or, maybe, like they said, it was an accident—anyway, they all went swimming off the Point and Wineapple drowned, and the police arrested T. W. Binder (who they knew from plenty of other things he’d done and never got caught for) but there wasn’t enough evidence for an indictment, and no trial. After all—who would the witnesses be, except the guilty parties?” Ava-Grace was smoking her cigarette furiously, yet with a measure of good humor. “In my line of work, Doctor—which I’d say is pretty different from yours: I’m a matron, and Sunday School teacher, at the Jersey City Women’s and Juvenile Detention Facility—I know one thing, real well: It’s easy to know who’s evil, but damned hard to get a solid case against them. Damned hard!”

  Terence was staring at Ava-Grace Renfrew with the look of a man who has been dealt a blow to the head. He felt, not pain, but its jarring aftermath.

  “Excuse me, I—I don’t quite understand. You seem to be saying—suggesting—that your sister was involved in a—murder?”

  “‘A murder’—? Did I suggest only one?” Ava-Grace laughed, flicking ash onto Terence’s desk.

  “But—”

  “Of course, to be fair to Ava-Rose, she never has been charged with anything, much; ‘innocent till proven guilty.’”

  Terence said, stiffly, “I should say so, yes. ‘Innocent till proven—otherwise.’” The ghastly-white face of Eldrick Gill shimmered before him, submerged in the murky waters of the Delaware River.

  Ava-Grace said, “My little nieces told me, Doctor, that you were one of the jurors for T. W. Binder’s trial, when he finally did get tried, for trying to kill Ava-Rose. So that’s how you met my sister? Terrific!” And she laughed again, heartily.

  “More or less.” Terence felt as if he were sinking.

  “That, they did get the poor bastard for, with Ava-Rose testifying against him. ‘Aggravated assault,’ eh?”

  Terence protested, “But—surely Binder was guilty? We jurors weighed the evidence, we listened to witnesses, examined the hospital report on your sister’s injuries—we voted unanimously for a verdict of ‘guilty.’ I refuse to believe that that man was not guilty.”

  Terence recalled with a pang of remorse how he’d coerced his fellow jurors into the “unanimous” verdict. But surely that too changed nothing, if the man was guilty?

  Ava-Grace said, ironically, “Wouldn’t you want to beat her up bad, if she’d gotten you to kill her old boyfriend, then kicked you out?—and kept all the money the old fool’d given her?”

  “I—”

  “I don’t blame the Trenton police, nor any law enforcement agency that deals with these people however they can. I know what these people are—they’re my people! The Trenton police wanted to get Binder, he’s a small-time drug dealer and thief, probably has a hand in stolen goods fencing, like my ‘uncle’ Riff, so they hear what he did to Ava-Rose and make a deal with her, maybe to drop bench warrants against her, or other Renfrews, and she agrees, and gets on the witness stand, and tells a tale that, gosh-sake, might even be true, mostly—and it works. You guys found Binder guilty, and he goes to Rahway. Not a long sentence but at least he did get put away.”

  “And he died there, in Rahway. But you must know that.”

  Ava-Grace frowned. “Yes, I’d heard that. I didn’t hear how, nor why. I mean, for sure, it was the Renfrews wanted him dead—scared what he’d do to them, when he got out. But I never heard who did it
, exactly. Who set it up. How money changed hands.” With a look at Terence that reminded him of similar audacious-coquettish looks of Ava-Rose’s, Ava-Grace suddenly winked. “You didn’t do it, in any case, Doctor, eh!—a gentleman like you”—glancing with naive admiration about Terence’s office—“wouldn’t know the first thing about arranging for a hit inside Rahway State Prison.”

  Terence drew breath to speak, but could not. His sensitive eyes were watering from this terrible woman’s smoke; the sensation of sinking, as beneath the surface of murky waves, grew stronger. Yet, with feeble cunning, he thought to deflect the drift of the conversation. “Then the trial—my trial—in June of last year—was a sort of charade? A cynical manipulation of the judicial process, by the district attorney’s office? A distortion of justice? And we jurors were unwitting collaborators?”

  Ava-Grace was surprisingly off-hand, shrugging. “Oh, well! A guy who’s guilty of murder, or, let’s say, manslaughter, letting another man drown, is also guilty of ‘aggravated assault,’ eh? That’s how the cops figure. God has His justice too—sometimes right here on earth.”

  Terence said, stammering, “But—T. W. Binder wasn’t being tried for Wineapple’s death—but for something else, entirely. We jurors were never informed. And even if Binder had helped drown Wineapple, he hadn’t acted alone. Your sister—” He was unable to continue.

  Ava-Grace said scornfully, “Yes, sir—but they couldn’t get enough evidence for that; couldn’t prove that, in court. If you can’t get a jury to convict, forget about a trial. The wicked dwelling among us comprehend that real well, which is why most of them are out, not in, where they belong.” Ava-Grace fingered the chunky imitation pearls around her neck. “At Jersey City, where I work, you’ll find the women and kids who are in are mainly the dopes. Can’t read, can’t write, can’t think. The smart ones, like Ava-Rose Renfrew, rarely get caught.”

  As Ava-Grace Renfrew spoke, reiterating earlier remarks, in her chatty, vehement way, Terence sat silent, rubbing his eyes. It seemed to him that his life his life since Ava-Rose: since love rushed past him, as in a mockingly accelerated film. Ava-Grace had brought him the truth Ava-Rose had obscured. And he had not known. He had always known. And now, he had no choice but to know.