Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  NO ONE DARED give the book to Hiram, directly. But one evening, having returned from a three-day business trip to Winterthur, he came upon it while riffling through an accumulation of financial newspapers and journals and odd bits of mail.

  Query. Poems by Vernon Bellefleur.

  No one was present in uncle Hiram’s room to observe his face as he snatched the book up; no one was present to observe with what urgency he began to read. A nerve twitched in his right cheek as he leafed quickly through the book, pausing here and there, murmuring a line of verse aloud. What was this—! How had anyone dared—!

  Trembling, Hiram forced himself to return to the beginning, and read the poems in order.

  Whether, in the end, he believed the poet to be his son, or an impostor, or, simply, a stranger with the improbable name of “Vernon Bellefleur”—no one knew. Nor was it known (for no one, not even Noel, dared ask) what he thought of the poems, whether he found their gnomic queries provocative or maddening. It was common knowledge that the book, a dozen of its handsome pages torn out and a dozen more mutilated, and the spine broken, was discarded along with the accumulation of newspapers, journals, and nuisance mail, and burnt in the incinerator by one of the servants.

  Air

  Insatiable Gideon Bellefleur!

  It was not known (for he himself would have scorned to keep a tally) how many women Gideon Bellefleur loved in his lifetime, and loved, shall it be said, successfully; still less was it known how many women loved him. (And loved without hope, in defiance of fate, even when it had become common knowledge throughout the region how cruelly Gideon behaved.) But it was known to a few persons at the Invemere airport, among them the former bomber pilot Tzara, who was to be Gideon’s flight instructor, that the last woman he loved was the tall, aloof, mysterious “Mrs. Rache” who, dressed in tight-fitting men’s trousers and a khaki jacket, appeared at the airport every week or ten days to take up, alone, the airport’s single Hawker Tempest, a surplus fighter from the last war. The Tempest was the little airport’s prize: for it boasted a 2,000 horsepower engine. And it was this feisty plane the Rache woman rented!

  Gideon fell in love with her one chilly November afternoon when he happened to see her striding into the hangar, roughly tucking her colorless brown hair into her helmet, her narrow shoulders hunched forward in an attitude of impatience, her back to him. She wore, as always, a man’s trousers. And a drab khaki-colored jacket or shirt. And her pilot’s helmet, with the amber goggles snugly in place. Gideon stared after her, losing the thread of the conversation he was having with Tzara. Quickly and helplessly his eye took in the compact strength of her buttocks and thighs, the long, lean stretch of her back, the graceless movement of her elbows as she tucked in her hair, eager to get to her plane. When Gideon did not reply to a question of Tzara’s but continued to stare into the hangar, Tzara said, with a sad smile, That’s the Rache woman. And that’s all I can tell you. We don’t even know exactly where she flies.

  BEFORE THAT GIDEON had loved Benjamin Stone’s wife, and before that a nineteen-year-old beauty named Hester, and before that . . . But the affairs had ended badly. Abruptly, and badly. There were tears and protestations and occasionally threats of suicide, and always self-pitying litanies: How did I fail you, Gideon, what did I do wrong, why won’t you look at me, why has everything changed. . . . Fatiguing, and predictable, and even at times silly, once Gideon’s feeling for a woman died (and it might die overnight—it might die in an hour), these sad litanies: and the tear-glistening cheeks and the mournful does’ eyes and the lips that, no longer eagerly kissed, always appeared faintly repellent. How did I fail you, Gideon, the women asked, sometimes “bravely,” sometimes in raw shameless gasping voices that might have been the voices of children; why have you stopped loving me, what did I do wrong, won’t you give me another chance, what has happened. . . .

  Gideon’s natural good manners prevented him from thrusting them away, or shouting at them to have some pride (for, like most of his family, he detested people who wept in public, or who broke down in situations clearly inhospitable to their tears); he had often to restrain himself from taking an abandoned mistress in his arms, and covering her face with kisses merely to soothe her, knowing how such an action would only prolong the woman’s agony. He had encountered women who, knowing love had died, would have eagerly and desperately settled for pity—that most despicable of emotions!—and it was his strategy, his necessary strategy, to behave as coolly and judiciously as possible with them, though never without courtesy, until they grasped the fact that he would never love them again: that the extraordinary “feeling” they had evoked in him simply did not exist any longer.

  Why, he wondered, sometimes irritably, did they love him?—why with such passion?

  How much simpler his life would have been, he often thought, if he’d been born with a different face! His cousin Vernon’s, for instance. Or a different manner, a different presence.

  In the months since his accident Gideon had begun to think about his life, though thinking, and certainly brooding, were quite alien to his character. The notion of thinking, of withdrawing oneself from action in order to systematically think, struck him as not only unmanly but implausible: for how could one force oneself to think, merely think, when the world awaited! But since his hospitalization Gideon had begun to contemplate his life, and though he never turned his thoughts onto his family or his marriage or, in fact, anything connected with the castle, he frequently considered the many women with whom he had been involved over the years.

  He had loved them, each of them, so much at the time. He had loved them painfully and recklessly and desperately. One after another after another . . . His need for them had been raw and intense, almost frighteningly intense; his sexual appetite at such times was insatiable. And far from alarming women this appetite seemed to evoke in them a corresponding hunger . . . or was it merely a helpless yearning . . . a wish, at bottom childish and doomed, to maintain that appetite even as they fed it, and to maintain their sense of themselves as beautiful, desirable women capable of a man’s prodigious desire. That there were so many ugly rumors about Gideon Bellefleur throughout the land, that he was (so it was whispered) responsible for more than one young woman’s death, seemed to deter other women not at all: he sometimes thought his reputation aided him. Though how perverse, how absurd, how doomed it all was—! His mother-in-law, the insidious spiteful Della, once muttered in his unwilling ear that after poor Garnet, every woman will deserve him, and though he hadn’t, of course, acknowledged the old woman’s words with more than a curt bow of his head, he was coming to see their gradual truth. For didn’t these women deserve their fate, bound up as it was with their endless capacity for self-delusion . . . ?

  And then there was Gideon himself: handsome, still, in a manner of speaking, but no longer the Gideon of old.

  He eyed himself without sentiment, even with a kind of sardonic gratification. For his skin was now sallow, even somewhat jaundiced—even, in certain lights, somewhat bronzed—and it was drawn tightly across his cheekbones, which were cruelly prominent. Hospitalized, he had had to endure the humiliation of endless examinations, and they had shaved his skull more than once, so that the hair grew out unevenly, in coarse gunmetal-gray clumps through which he could barely force a brush. He was now beardless, for the first time in many years. His angular jutting chin promised no tenderness, nor did his curved, sensual mouth, with its look of impatience. His eyes were darkly shadowed and striking, perhaps more striking than before, but he had, hadn’t he (so he amused himself, thinking as he eyed the stranger in the mirror), the gaunt watchfulness of a long-legged sharp-billed aquatic bird of prey . . . ! Flesh had melted away from him, not only at his belly and waist, but at his chest and shoulders and upper arms as well, so that he simply wasn’t as muscular, as strong, as he had been; and he wondered—was it his imagination, or had he actually lost an inch or two in height? His frame seemed to be settling down, settling into itself.
And of course he had a permanent limp, a rather appealing slight limp, as a consequence of his smashed right kneecap.

  Gideon Bellefleur, so much changed! Yet he saw clearly that it was Gideon Bellefleur. And he was still handsome, even with that gaunt hungry stare, and the cold, rather reptilian smile he could not, it seemed, control. Women were struck by him, they were attracted to him, they succumbed (after a siege that might be absurdly protracted, or absurdly abbreviated) to his demands, and this was “love,” this was a “love affair,” always profoundly exciting at the start. Perhaps if he shaved his head again, Gideon thought, and went about with a convict’s mean, sour, ravenous look, women would then fear him . . . ? Or would it have little effect?

  The only woman in the land who could never be brought to feel desire, let alone love, for him was Leah. And so he was free, wasn’t he, he was wonderfully free, fairly drunken with freedom, and quite guiltless! The world was all before him, to explore as he wished. And hadn’t his own mother-in-law predicted that each of his women, after Garnet, would deserve her fate?

  STILL, HE FELL in love with the Rache woman, whose first name no one—not even Gideon—ever learned.

  Even before happening to notice her at the little airport north of Invemere Gideon had been mildly interested in private planes; it was a slight prickling of an interest, strong one day, somewhat abated the next, unpredictable. The previous spring he had arranged for an extensive and costly crop-dusting operation out of the Invemere airport, and he had found himself boyishly impressed with the aging pilot Tzara’s performance. Flying with such lordly brazenness low across the fields of wheat and alfalfa—pulling back and rearing, rising, at the very final moment, to avoid a line of trees—bringing the battered old Cessna high, with an appearance of effortlessness—checking speed and dropping—and then again rising—the single constant-speed propeller whirring invisibly—the low-slung wings and prominent tail now colorless, now glaring with sunlight as if afire: how masterful Tzara was! As Gideon sat in his airconditioned automobile, with the windows rolled up tight, Tzara had flown over the road, quite low over the automobile, and waved at him. He had, it seemed, winked. Or so Gideon thought.

  And in that instant it seemed to Gideon that Tzara—who was in his late fifties, if not older, and had flown more than two hundred bombing missions in the war-before-last—possessed a freedom that went beyond anything Gideon had ever known. The speed, the mastery!—the daring! The courage! Tzara in the compact little plane, skimming low over the Bellefleur fields, with clouds of white powder billowing out behind him, Tzara in his frayed helmet and goggles, hired by the hour, a servant, in a sense, of Gideon’s, nevertheless soared above Gideon, and knew secrets Gideon did not know.

  The plane’s agility, even hampered as it was by the 1,800-pound chemical hopper tank, made Gideon’s automobile seem tiresomely earthbound.

  AFTER THE ACCIDENT he had come to feel a certain revulsion for cars. Not for the cars themselves—for he admired, still, their appearance—so much as for the fact that, in a car, one was forced to drive along a road. A narrow strip of pavement; or, worse, a dirt or gravel road. How predictable it was, how earthbound. His fastest car had taken him 125 miles per hour along the highway to Innisfail, late at night or very early in the morning, but even the Cessna crop-duster could fly at 151 miles per hour, and there was an open-cockpit Fairchild at the airport that could go much faster. And there was, of course, the Hawker Tempest with its compact body and comparatively brief and low-slung wings, and its dazzling bold red-and-black fuselage. . . .

  Who is that woman, Gideon wanted to know, the one who takes up the fighter? How does she know how to handle it? Did she get her license here? Don’t you know anything about her?

  Only that her name was Rache. But not even that: only that she was married to a man named Rache, whom they never saw.

  Tall, lean, flat-bodied. With the hips of a young boy. Always, in the instant before Gideon (who had taken to hanging about the airport) managed to see her, pulling the plastic goggles down over her eyes, tucking her hair impatiently into the helmet. A strong jaw, pursed lips, a handsome deeply tanned skin. Her profile, Gideon saw, almost with resentment, was aristocratic: the nose not unlike his own. He judged her age to be thirty, thirty-two. . . . She was not exactly young, she was certainly not a girl, and he was tired, ah, how he was tired, of the trembling bleating inconsolable passions of girls! Perhaps, he thought one day, having nearly confronted her as she strode toward her plane, she was even older. Whatever age she was would please him. She would please him, simply by glancing his way.

  He stood on the runway, shading his eyes, watching her taxi the plane out, steeling himself against the propeller’s passing roar and the possibility—which was of course only a frail possibility—that she might suddenly lose control of the plane, just at takeoff, and nose-dive into that clump of poplars. He stood on the cinder runway, shivering in his lightweight clothes, watching the Hawker Tempest until it was well out of sight—rising and rising and rising, and banking to the left, to the west, toward the mountains. Sometimes he waited for her to return, though she was always gone a considerable period of time, and it halfway embarrassed him, that she should see him there, waiting, so flat-footed and earthbound and hopeful. Waiting for her. Waiting for something.

  HE HAD COME to feel a certain revulsion for the earth itself.

  He had been thrown against it so carelessly, as if he were nothing more substantial than a rag doll. Knocked against the windshield of the Rolls, tossed against the door and against the stubbled cornfield—dripping blood into the August dust—crying Germaine, Germaine! My God, what have I done to you! (And, later, in the hospital in Nautauga Falls, waking delirious from the anesthesia, he had continued to call for her. Why did he think, everyone wondered, he had carried his three-year-old daughter off, to speed with him along the Innisfail road?)

  A certain revulsion for the earth, and for himself. Tricked as he had been, by the men who had tampered with his car. (Yet had he been tricked, knowing very well that they had tampered with it?) . . . A revulsion for Gideon. Walking on the earth. Walking on the earth as one must, so long as one lived. And now he limped, now his right knee ached, he was beginning to resemble his father whom he had, he scarcely knew when, stopped loving.

  Germaine . . . ?

  Far from home, in nameless towns, often with nameless women beside him, Gideon woke uttering that name. Germaine, is it time? Is it time for all of us to die?

  INSATIABLE GIDEON!

  Fascinated now with the air, and with planes. What is air, and how do we climb into it? How do we escape the earth?

  Falling in love with the Rache woman, who either ignored him or returned his greeting with a curt nod. His blood going heavy and sullen with love for her: his breath going shallow.

  Cessnas and Fairchilds and Beechcrafts and Stinsons and Piper Cubs and other small light planes, taxiing along the bumpy runway and lifting above the poplars and banking into the wind and rising, rising . . .

  He came to love the odor of gasoline and oil. And the hush, the fear, the almost palpable fear (for the plane might crash in the instant its wheels touched earth) as Tzara returned with one of his student pilots. Shall I take lessons? Shall I make a fool of myself? Why the hell not!

  Prowling about the grimy little airport, whistling tunelessly. Making casual conversation with the mechanics, who never flew, who had no interest in flying, but who had certain opinions—offered cautiously enough—about the Rache woman. (Her original pilot’s license, they said, had been issued in Germany.) Feeding coins to the cigarette machine and smoking those stale cigarettes; chewing, simply because his hunger leapt upon him, chocolate bars tasting of wax, from the vending machine in the manager’s office. Gideon in love, insatiable Gideon in love. When the Hawker Tempest taxied out the runway and lifted into the sky and began its slow ascent Gideon felt his soul drawn after it, thinner and thinner, until nothing remained in the cold glowering air but the wind sock’s sul
len flapping noise. It was the noise, he knew, of his own heartbeat.

  Insatiable Gideon Bellefleur, a gaunt shivering figure at the Invemere airport, obviously homeless.

  THOUGH TZARA KNEW the Bellefleurs were buying the airport, he never spoke of the transaction to Gideon; when he spoke, and he spoke rarely, it was only about flying, and about the weather.

  He took Gideon up for the first time in a Curtiss biplane with faded yellow wings, one of his own planes. Gideon climbed into the cockpit, his eyes filling with tears behind the amber-tinted goggles. Of course his life was being changed. It would never be the same again. His heart rocked in his chest as if he were a small child, and genuinely frightened.

  What is air, and how do we climb into it? How do we escape the earth?

  The old plane taxied down the runway, bouncing and vibrating, and lifted, at the last minute (for the line of scrawny poplars had been rushing back with dismaying speed), and Gideon’s breath was torn from him and he exclaimed aloud with a child’s delight and terror: ah, how wonderful! how uncanny! they were in the air now! they were flying! Absurdly, he could not stop trembling. His jaws clenched, his breath came in shudders. As if it were secretly attached to the earth the pit of his stomach sank as the plane rose.

  Now the earth fell away. It was only a surface, falling away. As Gideon stared in amazement the sky swung downward and opened majestically. The poplars were gone. The weedy field adjacent to the runway was gone. Now they were flying, wind-buffeted and rattling crazily, above a forest. And now above a field. In the near distance the Powhatassie River wound narrowly through winter fields, glittering snakelike as he had never seen it before. Tzara carried them above it, and it was gone, fallen away behind them. Fields, forests, rectangles of farmland, houses and barns and silos and outbuildings, grazing animals in snow-stubbled fields, ever smaller, ever more miniature as they climbed into the air: how queer, how marvelous, how uncanny! Of course it was perfectly commonplace, planes were perfectly commonplace, Gideon knew he had nothing to fear, and yet he could not stop trembling, and he could not stop a mad sunny smile from raying across his face. At last! Such joy! Such freedom! His heart soaring! His spirit rising above the earth!