I'll Take You There

by Joyce Carol Oates

  "You!—what are you doing here? How dare you?"

  I turned in terror to see Mrs. Thayer in the doorway behind me, staring with widened incredulous eyes. She too had escaped the Kappa festivities. She'd entered her suite from the rear. For a long moment I was paralyzed; a wave of horror passed over me, like filthy water; yet I felt too a kind of relief; for now it was over between us, or nearly. Mrs. Thayer strode to the cupboard and shoved in the drawers with such force that the bottles clattered together. In her bulging eyes I saw fury. Loathing and fear. "Bloody beastly gurl! Sick disgusting gurl! Out of my room, out! Out!" Yet when I moved to ease past her, Mrs. Thayer struck at me; grabbed at me; clung to both my arms, beginning to cry. I could smell the fumes of her labored breath. Her powdered face was streaked with tears, rivulets like acid in the caked powder. I tried to speak, but my throat had shut tight. I was helpless as a child trapped in terror; in desperation trying to escape by crawling across Mrs. Thayer's bed but the older woman seized me in her arms that, though fattish and flaccid, were surprisingly strong, and she held me fast, sobbing angrily,"—of all the gurls! These demon gurls! Only you I could trust! In this hellish place only you! And now! How could you! Betray me! You are a pawn, a pawn in their bloody game! Run, run for your life!" Mrs. Thayer's voice rose in hysteria, her words were senseless for even as she cried for me to run for my life she was clutching me against her, we were two swimmers drowning together; her arms so tight around me, I was in tenor of suffocating. Sobbing, cursing, so terribly strong for a woman of her age, I struggled against her crazed and yet unable to break her grip, in that instant I felt the madness rush out of me like dirty water and into Mrs. Thayer. I could not have named her: only she was she, the female, smelling of talcum, sweet wine, sweaty desperation, this person clutching at me. Uncontrollably she wept, knocking her head against my head, suddenly I was too weak to struggle, I ceased to resist. My face was contorted like an infant's though I could not cry, I had no tears left, I was a child, penitent, a child who has been punished, my heart broken. Beyond the bed as in a nightmare scenario faces had gathered aghast and avid in the doorway—my Kappa sisters. At first there were only a few, then more faces crowded in, and yet more. Astonished glittering eyes, bouffant heads bobbing like cobras' heads. Moist parted scandalized lipsticked lips. Behind these, yet more pushed forward eager to see. Kappas! Their thrilled sibilant voices lifted like the winds that blow across our glacier-tortured hills. What is it? What has happened? What are those two doing? Who is that girl—the Jew?

  * * *

  II.

  The Negro-Lover

  1

  I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.

  Spinoza

  The danger of falling in love, in winter.

  2

  … a voice of logic, reason, conviction; a voice of irony, cajoling; a seductive voice; an arrogant voice; a young impetuous voice; a voice of occasional hesitation, uncertainty; a voice that provoked, annoyed, beset like the bared teeth of an attack dog; a shrewd voice; a Now just listen to me, I'm the one to tell you voice; a voice of humility; a voice of (mock) humility; a voice sharp and cruel as a knifeblade; a voice like warm butter; a low throaty trombone voice; a voice of hurt; a voice of sorrow; a voice of pain; a voice of yearning; a voice of rage; a voice sinewy and sly as a glimpsed glittering snake; a voice I would have wished for myself if I'd been born male, and not female; a voice I did wish for myself though born not male but female; a voice that so seeped into my consciousness that it began to emerge in the late winter of my second year at the university in my most vivid, ravaging and exhausting dreams.

  3

  Deceptive from the start: he lived in the most ordinary of places. Very quickly I saw, I'd tracked him to his lair. A second-floor rear apartment in a squat three-story lard-colored stucco apartment building at 1183 Chambers Street, Syracuse. In this "mixed" neighborhood beyond the showy complex of university hospital buildings; in the harsh shadow of new, cheaply stylish high-rise buildings and multi-level parking garages; a sublunary region of small storefront businesses, shamefaced wood frame houses partitioned into rooms for university students, many dark-skinned and foreign. There can be no beauty here, therefore no hurt and no hope.

  Chambers Street was one of the most cruelly steep hills in the vicinity of the university; cars parked with their wheels turned shrewdly inward to the curb; the pavement was cracked and potholed and littered; a number of the curbside elms, blighted by Dutch elm disease, had been chainsawed into oblivion, only their stumps remained. Yet Chambers Street was a place of fascination and romance. Yet Chambers Street had entered my imagination. Imprinted in my brain like an ink stain on something white, moist, boneless as a mollusc was the facade of the stucco building at 1183 Chambers: I understood that it was not beautiful, nor did it possess even the diminished melancholy of those dream-like city buildings painted by Edward Hopper; it was a purely functional setting, a place of mere expediency; the sign beside the front entrance never changed, as if to confirm its futility—apts for rent inquire within. My sharp eye took note of a row of badly stained and battered metal garbage cans at the curb; a shingled roof that looked as if it must leak; a fractured concrete walk leading to the front entrance, but also forking around the side of the building to the rear, and to a flight of outdoor steps that led to the second floor of the building; a stairway of raw planks with a makeshift roof. Up those stairs he sometimes climbed.

  I told myself I am only just passing through this neighborhood, I have a true destination.

  In those months I walked everywhere, I was restless, a prowler. Never did I walk on University Place, though. I'd been cured of the Kappas. I'd been cured of my Kappa-yearnings forever. My walking, wayward and seemingly improvised, took me often to the eastern edge of the sprawling campus, though my residence hall was in another direction. Sometimes I passed 1183 Chambers twice: there might be a plausible reason for twice. Sometimes I passed 1183 Chambers three times, for which there could be no plausible reason. And so I walked swiftly, guiltily. Eyes averted from the object of my interest. I had no way of knowing if he was home unless light shone through his windows, and I had no way of knowing if light shone through his windows unless I went around to the rear of the building, at twilight or after dark; though solitary walking by young women in this part of Syracuse was discouraged. (Once, a patrol car slowed at the curb, its occupants stared at me without expression as quickly I continued to walk glancing toward them with a small frightened smile I am a good girl, I am a university student, don't arrest me!) To linger in the vicinity of 1183 Chambers was tricky, for he might be on his way home and might recognize me; if he recognized me, I might not know since, given his secrecy and arrogance, he would not have allowed me to know that he'd recognized me; and so I would not know if in his eyes I'd been exposed, or if, in fact, he'd taken not the slightest notice of me, and so I remained innocent. Sometimes, seeing a man approaching on the sidewalk, I panicked and fled into the trash-littered alley; sometimes this was the very alley beside 1183 Chambers, and I was forced to pass close by the outdoor wooden stairs; so suddenly tempted to climb those stairs, or to sit on the lower stairs as if I belonged there. Usually he entered the building from the front, to get his mail I supposed, for there were rows of battered metal mailboxes just inside the foyer, with names inked onto adhesive tape to identify them; but if luck ran against me, as I could not assume it would not, for possibly I deserved luck to run against me, behaving as I was, he might decide to enter the building from the rear, for the stairway was for the convenience of tenants like himself who lived on the upper floors of the building at the rear; he was a tenant like any other, most of them dark-skinned and foreign with smiles that seemed uniformly flashing-white and eyeballs of unnatural glistening whiteness; if these young men saw me, sometimes they paused to stare as if they hoped I might know them; they hoped that there was some reason for me to be where I was, and that this r
eason might extend to them; what they'd been told of American college girls intrigued them, perhaps, though surely I didn't fit any likely description of an American college girl. Behind his building, if no one was around, and if I dared, I lifted my eyes to the windows I had reason to believe were his, the windows of apartment 2D; I'd learned that his was apartment 2D by examining the mailboxes in the foyer where, on a grubby strip of adhesive tape on the box for 2D, V. MATHEIUS had been inked. It intrigued me, his blinds were so often drawn to the windowsills. Sometimes I saw a shadow passing behind a blind, the fleeting silhouette of a man; yet so indistinctly, I knew that I was gazing at the idea of V. Matheius and not at the man himself; I thought of Plato's allegory of the cave, and of how mankind is deluded by shadows; mankind is infatuated by shadows; and yet, what solace is there, otherwise? And his not knowing that I am here, that I exist. For I am invisible to him.

  My naked face, raw female yearning.

  4

  … that voice.

  In my Ethics class. In a large lecture room on the topmost floor of an ancient and revered building, the Hall of Languages. It was not the classroom in which the sickly girl in the soiled coat, smeared eyeshadow and bitten lips made such a fool of herself some weeks before, it was another, larger room; it was a place of hope. At the conclusion of his lecture on Plato, the professor made a show of inviting questions, perhaps truly he wanted questions, hoped for questions, intelligent and provocative questions, to alleviate the unnatural stillness of the lecture hall; perhaps, on his raised platform, behind the podium, as an avatar of long-vanished Plato, he was lonely. Questions from undergraduates interested him far less than questions from the several graduate students who were taking, or auditing, the course, for these were fellow professionals; clearly he was enlivened when one or another of these voluntered to speak.

  "Yes, Mr. ____" the professor would say, with an expectant smile, pronouncing a name that sounded like "math"—"mathes."The young man who'd raised his hand sat at the back of the hall, out of my range of vision; when he spoke, as he did nearly every class period, I noted how students around me turned, to frown; with disapproval, and yet with admiration; with curiosity, interest, and resentment. "—how Plato can promote the strategy of the 'noble lie'—as if any lie can be anything other than ignoble—" And the professor tried to smile, to argue in defense of Plato: "The Republic is best understood as a myth, a dialogue about justice," and he at the back of the hall objected, "'Justice'? How can there be 'justice' in a totalitarian state?" Like a musical instrument, a horn of subtle modulations, clarinet, trombone, the voice was both respectful and insolent; the voice was searching, and earnest, and yet (almost you could hear this) quavering with indignation. Where the professor argued, "—myth, allegory, parable—" the younger voice argued, "—nightmare fascist state—slave-state—" The professor frowned, not liking it that he was in danger of losing the allegiance of the class to an interloper thirty years younger than he, "That's a common fallacy, Mr.____. To interpret Plato literally. When clearly the entire dialogue is a metaphor, a—" By this time few in the class were listening to the professor, we were listening avidly to him.

  The curious proportions of that lecture hall: imprinted in my memory like any space in which our lives have been altered. There were fifteen rows of seats in steeply rising tiers that curved far to each side in the shape of a crescent, so that the room was much wider than it was deep. The ceiling was extremely high, and water-stained; fluorescent tubing hummed and quivered overhead like racing thoughts. Beside tin professor's podium was a ten-foot leaded-glass window that yielded pale wintry glare. On a badly scuffed hardwood platform the professor sometimes paced, lecturing on Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquina Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke; he was in his early sixties, perhaps his manner congenial, but authoritative; his near-bald head like an eggshell, his mouth like something that has been mashed; his eyes watery but shrewd, alert, deep-set beneath kindly grizzled-gray eyebrows

  An attractive man, I thought, for his age; though I did not wish to judge the appearances of those of my elders whom I revered. For what were appearances, as the Greek philosophers taught, but illusory, deceiving? Who but the very young, and fools, put their faith in "appearances"? Nor did I want to be reminded of my father, by contemplating a man who was my father's age, or a little older; my father who'd disappeared into the West as if following the passage of the sun, beyond the western range of mountains and into oblivion.

  As if I could compare them! I thought with a smile. This learned man and my poor uneducated alcoholic and embittered father.

  One morning following the professor's lecture on philosophic idealism there was a protracted exchange between the professor and an articulate if rather dogged young man who sat at the back of the room; I felt a collective wave of dislike directed toward the young man, from my fellow students; but I simply listened in fascination, excitement and apprehension; thinking Who is that, what kind of person is that? Like no one of us. Behind me a male voice muttered sullenly, "Oh for Christ's sake shut up," and another what sounded like "N'ggg shut yo mouth," and both laughed unkindly. By this time the professor was speaking defensively and at length; he would punish the entire class by keeping us behind the end of the hour. I thought We should not have such power over one another. When finally the class dispersed I was slow to rise to my feet, and to stumble into the aisle; still I had not allowed myself to look at the back of the room; I did not yet understand that I was in love; I'd fallen in love with a man I did not know; with a man's mere voice; and that was a kind of illness; not a radiant idea as I'd imagined but a physical notion, like grief.

  That night in February 1963, the night his voice first entered my world.

  5

  You! You are capable of any thing. My brother Hendrick once told me.

  Any thing. How strange these words: any thing and not anything. As if that of which I was capable was a thing, a palpable thing, and not an action.

  It was at my grandfather's funeral that Hendrick told me this. Yet my brother had no idea what I was capable of, nor did anyone in my family. They distrusted me; around me there glimmered a dark, mysterious aura; I carried both the fact and the possibility of doom. He blames her. We all do. For Ida's death. I escaped from them, yet I bore their condemnation. Perhaps I accepted it. I was so lonely! Yet I thought Loneliness is my due. It's only just.

  I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes. At nineteen, to my disgust, I continued to look much younger. I would be mistaken for a high school student through my undergraduate years. I went in my winter boots (not of the leather of a kind worn by my better-dressed classmates but clumsy rubberized boots from Sears, wonderfully practical for deep snows and torrential spring rains.) I stood about five feet three inches. I never weighed myself but, at the time of my "crisis," when I departed the Kappa Gamma Pi house, I was put on a scale by a nurse in the university infirmary, and my weight noted as ninety-six pounds. "Have you stopped eating? Do you vomit up your food? This isn't your normal weight, is it?" the woman asked disapprovingly. I told her I didn't know what my "normal" weight was; I wasn't interested in my "normal" weight; I had other things on my mind, matters of pressing significance. The meaning of life. The possibility of truth. The analysis of consciousness as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids. I did not wish to consider that I was a body, and that I was in some way responsible for this body. (And what in fact is a body? Descartes had hypothesized that a mysterious and unknowable substance constituted mind, and an entirely other mysterious and unknowable substance constituted body.) In the infirmary I was forced to look at myself as an act of penance. I avoided the sunken eyes in the face, but looked frankly at
the rest of myself: the papery-thin tallow-colored skin stretched tight upon slender bones, breasts the size of Dixie cups and hard as unripe pears, nipples the size of wizened peas and nothing at all like the warm roseate aureole of those girls' breasts I presumed to be "normal"; the heavy, full breasts of other girls which looked as if already they held liquid, sweet milky precious liquid, the shy elixir of life. I remembered how in junior high I saw older girls in locker room laughingly peeling off their outer clothes, yanking sweaters over their heads in a single quick gesture that exposed their boobs even as their heads and faces were obscured; you could see that these girls were sisters; these girls were "female"; standing defiant or proud or indifferent in their burgeoning bodies while I turned away in embarrassment, not that I felt inadequate or inferior in my spindly body, but of another species altogether. I stood outside their category entirely, a marginal sub-species, girl.