I'll Take You There

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Overhead, a chattering of jays like monkeys in a jungle.

  21

  The way out. To show the fly the way out of the bottle was the life's hope of Ludwig Wittgenstein but the truth is that human beings don't want a way out of the bottle; we are captivated, enthralled by the interior of the bottle; its glassy sides caress and console us; its glassy sides are the perimeters of our experience and our aspiration; the bottle is our skin, our soul; we're accustomed to the visual distortions of the glass; we would not wish to see clearly, without the barrier of the glass; we could not breathe a fresher air; we could not survive outside the bottle.

  Or tell ourselves, in the glassy-echoing language of the bottle, that this is so.

  22

  As the ancient Jewish people, persecuted by their enemies, interpreted history and the random events of nature moralistically, believing that catastrophes even of weather and geology were consequences of man's evil, so in times of emotional distress we're inclined to ascribe moral significance to whatever happens. We cease believing in chance and cling to a belief in design; we can't accept that we don't deserve what happens to us; we prefer a wrathful, capricious god to no god at all. Like children we try to influence what can't be influenced; we beg to be treated mercifully. We become superstitious. We lose our moorings, we drift into madness.

  When I was in love with Vernor Matheius, I did not believe that I could live without Vernor Matheius; with the clarity of thought of a geometrician I believed that to live without Vernor Matheius was to live a life so broken and depleted, it could not have been endured. That season of my life when I became twenty years old and passed out of girlhood forever. That season when it seemed to me (sometimes!) that Vernor Matheius might to some inscrutable degree love me in return; at the very least, there was that possibility. That season when I carried myself in the world like glass so fragile it might shatter at any moment.

  That season when I understood that my euphoria, my grief, my fear, my hope were symptoms of madness. Yet I couldn't alter my behavior: I didn't want to alter my behavior; for that would have been to abandon the madness, the hope of being loved by Vernor Matheius; that would have been to abandon the bottle in which the fly was trapped; that would have been to die.

  I was convinced that the connection between Vernor Matheius and myself was a force outside my volition as it was outside his; it would consume us both like wildfire. Therefore every glance—every facial expression—every word—every gesture of mine, however casual— had to be controlled. Always I watched myself. Always I judged myself. From childhood I'd known that there is a way of behaving that is good, decent, virtuous, and blameless; yet I had not much cared; for the worst had already happened to me, my mother had died; as a child I could not perceive otherwise than My mother's death happened to me; it was difficult to perceive that my mother's death had in fact happened to her. So now I reasoned: if I was good, decent, virtuous, and blameless I would be rewarded with Vernor Matheius's love; if not, not. There was no god monitoring such behavior; no more a Jewish god than a god of the Strykersville Lutheran church. But there was no need for a god. I'd become increasingly superstitious: as in the childhood of the race spirits and demons were believed to populate the invisible world, obsessively and absurdly concerned with human affairs, so it seemed to me in my love for Vernor Matheius that invisible forces were on my side, or against me; at all times I had to placate them; I couldn't ignore them or refute them; I couldn't risk defying them; I had to guard against impulsive wishful thoughts; as a young adolescent I'd first realized If you want a thing to happen, that is the thing that will not happen. Thinking for instance Vernor will call me tonight, we will make love in his bed fatally assured that this would not happen. My thoughts had no power to control my fate yet my thoughts were omniscient. How could this be? And yet it was. To counter these forlorn wish-thoughts all my thoughts had to be strictly monitored. To counter wish-thoughts all my behavior had to be strictly monitored. When I was reading, working, my mind wholly concentrated on mental effort, I was safe; I was relatively safe; my zeal as a student had never been greater because I had never been more driven; I understood too that Vernor Matheius could respect only an intelligent woman, a woman of academic accomplishment approaching his own; this was the root of my motivation, of my high grades. If my lover admired Wittgenstein, I must learn all I could of Wittgenstein. Though not daring to think He will love me Jot my intelligence, he will have no choice.

  I was required to be "good." I smiled often, I was gracious, courteous, patient, kind. Even when the effort was exhausting. Even when my heart was breaking. Even when I wanted to die, to extinguish myself completely, to be free of my sick, radiant love for Vernor Matheius, to be free of love.

  Is something wrong? is something wrong with your face? one of them was asking. A girl in Norwood Hall who'd seemed to be my friend. I was hurt, I was angry; I stared at her, eyes shining with tears like shards of glass. What do you mean? what is wrong with my face? and the girl who'd only meant to be kind said, embarrassed Your face seems stiff and frozen sometimes, you smile with just one side of your face.

  23

  "Anellia, lie down."

  So that day he'd urged me. For the first time entering my body as a lover.

  Making love clumsily, frantically in the grass; in the spongey earth; we two who'd come together to an impasse where language would fail us. Nothing but this. This! Veins stood out in Vernor's neck; a vein at his temple; he breathed quickly as if running; as if struggling; with his strong fingers he gripped my thighs as he pushed himself into me, kneading, squeezing my flesh that would be marbled with bruises for days afterward. I refused to cry out in pain, though I had never felt such pain; I refused to cry Oh! Vernor I love you because I knew he expected it of me. He hadn't removed any of his clothing, only opened his trousers, with quick practiced fingers he'd lifted my skirt, pushed aside the crotch of my underwear, guided himself into me. This, this and this! And done. Vernor said nothing as he made love to me, and would say nothing when he finished; at the end a soft, drawn-out moan of astonishment; a sound of helplessness and even incredulity. He'd collapsed then on top of me as if we'd fallen together from a height, with no knowledge of how we'd been injured. I was proud that I hadn't resisted; that I hadn't flinched in pain; the pain was a brightly flaring flame into which I thrust myself willingly; I was hammered, pounded, driven into the earth; overhead the sky reeled crazily, I could not have stammered the words for sky, cloud, pain, love.

  24

  We are unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge.

  Nietzsche

  Now we were lovers, now I would become familiar to him. Now there could be silence between us. The silence that allows us to forget that another is near, or exists.

  When Vernor was bored, depressed, restless; when philosophy failed him, and his thoughts backed up like sewage he could taste, then he wanted a girl, he wanted a female body, by chance he wanted Anellia—C'mon girl: sing for me. Grinning at me like a death's head. Unshaven. Damp carnivore teeth. And not very white or very even teeth. I tried to object, what gave him the idea that I could sing? Was he mistaking me for someone else? Now glaring at me like a pasha Vernor said Sing, girl. You can save your life if you sing the right song. So, barefoot on the floorboards of Vernor's apartment (grimy shades partway drawn, windows shoved upward to dispel the airlessness) I sang what flew into my mind, haphazardly, shut my eyes singing imperfectly recalled song lyrics I'd heard on the radio as a girl, unmediated, shameless female longing for love, and Vernor laughing would clap loudly Faster, girl! Speed up the beat! Move that skinny little white ass of yours. I too laughed, for it was funny; out of my mouth burst crazy snatches of song, fragments of my torment in the Kappa house, the simpleminded maddening tunes of the Kingston Trio certain of the girls played repeatedly, and the pop-calypso

  Hey c'mon Kitch let's go to bed

  I gotta small comb to scratch ya head

  which made Vernor burst int
o louder laughter, hearing such idiocy, such stupid smut, and of course it was black calypso from the Caribbean in a degraded bastardized form, so funny I sang again

  Hey c'mon Kitch let's go to bed

  I gotta small comb to scratch ya head

  as Vernor rose to take hold of me, to pull me to him, with an expression almost of tenderness.

  "Girl, you surprise me. Sometimes."

  Desire rising in a man's eyes like a swiftly lit flame.

  Like a swiftly lit flame, desire rising in a man's eyes.

  When he was bored and depressed. When he was (he frankly acknowledged) in one of his shitty moods.

  Two kinds of mood: the Inspired and the Shitty. Swinging between them like a monkey on bars.

  He would write a treatise on it: The Epistemology of the Inspired and the Shitty; a Prolegomenon to Any Future Metaphysics.

  On principle Vernor Matheius disapproved of moods. Was there acknowledgement of mood in Descartes, Spinoza, Kant? Mood as a category of human mental experience didn't exist in serious philosophical inquiry. Succumb to a mood and you're no longer a philosopher but something wounded, diminished. Like a violinist who breaks his violin. In such moods Vernor Matheius despised himself and in a way remarkable to me (who observed him sympathetically, if mostly in silence) did not seem to know himself.

  Bored and depressed! And the spring so rich, rife with smells, even the night air of the city so fresh it made me yearn to walk for hours. But Vernor's thoughts were backed up and he didn't want to see newspaper headlines, pushing away scattered pages of the Syracuse paper left behind on a table in the coffeehouse or in a restaurant where we'd arranged to meet, didn't want to know of the civil rights marches that spring in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, the police attack dogs, Ku Klux Klan bombings, arrests of civil rights volunteers; Vernor wished the volunteers well, hoped they would succeed he said but he hadn't time to spare for politics, activism, even the contemplation of such activism. Time is an hourglass running in only one direction he said. I did not say I think they must he very brave, some of them very reckless living in time, in history for these thoughts hadn't yet crystallized in my mind, the words weren't there.

  Love for any one thing is barbaric (so Vernor quoted Nietzsche back to me, but giving the aphorism a personal twist) yet more contemptible is lust, yet more contemptible than lust the habit of lust, the addiction. The body's odd compulsion, to grovel in another's flesh. As if redemption, meaning, one's own identity, might be found in another's flesh. That warm eager leap of seed, the promise in it. (Even if thwarted, by Vernor's technique of coming on my belly, not inside me; or tugging a condom on his erect, bobbing penis.) The habit of drinking (yes, Vernor admitted he was drinking more than he wanted to). And smoking (yes, Vernor was certainly smoking more, a foul filthy ridiculous and expensive addiction resulting in overflowing ashtrays and a perpetual bluish haze in the apartment). When his thoughts backed up. When he was in one of his moods. Shouldn't (he knew!) blame Anellia, poor sweet Anellia who loved him when he didn't deserve love, nor even respect; when his work wasn't going well; when he was praised wrongly (by, among others, his dissertation advisor, a professor twenty years Vernor's senior) though his work wasn't going well; and now the Humanities fellowship, which intensified his sense of how his work wasn't going well; yes, his work was adequate, his ideas were moderately original (if it's possible to be moderate in originality), but it wasn't the revolutionary treatise he'd intended to write. When he lost faith in himself, and in philosophy as a discipline to transcend the self; when he fell beneath the spell of philosophical puzzlement; beneath the spell of the tragic, lacerating Wittgenstein for whom the posing of unanswerable riddle-questions was a strategy for the postponement of Wittgenstein's suicide (of his four brothers, three had killed themselves) as the nightly storytelling of Scheherazade was a strategy for the postponement of the storyteller's murder; when he lost faith not in philosophy but in the very concept of faith; when he despised all who admired him; when he despised me for adoring him; when he despised himself for being adored; for how like any addiction was a man's sexual desire; a man's bluntly physical sexual need; that weakness of imagination he believed he'd conquered years ago in the seminary; yet now it seemed to have returned; how like a sickness that need for Anellia whose true name he declined to recall, the thin palely gleaming body, a Caucasian female body into which he might fall as in a dream without limits. Removing my clothes as if I were a child to be undressed. Studying me with scholarly objectivity adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. Some of this was joking, playful; yet beneath the playfulness a strange sobriety; like a philosopher in a medieval woodcut gazing upon a skull, in wonder-merit; brushing away my crossed arms where I tried to hide myself, embarrassed by his scrutiny.

  Don't pretend, Anellia. It's too late for that.

  Whispering words not meant for me to hear, words of angry endearment or obscenities or curses; the voice was hoarse, cracked; the voice was not Vernor Matheius's voice; it was not the voice I'd originally loved; a voice of helpless, furious desire; a voice of backed-up drains; a voice choked by desire, and by the resentment of desire; but often Vernor would say nothing at all, nor did he seem to trust himself touching me except in a proprietary measuring way, running his thumb against a small vein by my hairline, framing my face in his hands and bringing both his thumbs dangerously close to my eyes. Such beautiful eyes, Anellia and this was part of the puzzlement for he'd scarcely been aware of me in the early weeks of our affair, it was as if (but could this be possible?) he'd been blind to me, and therefore ignorant, misled; saying How can you trust me, who could gouge out your eye in an instant but of course (of course!) I trusted him, winced but never protested when he squeezed my breasts as if hoping to squeeze liquid from them, squeezed my bruised thighs, my small buttocks smoothly cupped in his hands as he began to make love to me in jagged, pumping spurts, whispering what he wished not to say aloud Your tight stingy little cunt your skin the color and texture of your skin are repulsive to me don't you know? don't you know? can't you guess? can't you guess? guess? guess? as he pumped himself into me in accelerating rhythm How can you love me? how can you be fucked by me? how can you so debase yourself? Never would I have dared to say But I love you; though often in my dreams I said But I love you: my lover would cover my mouth with his to suffocate my speech; as his pleasure mounted he would grind his mouth, his teeth, against mine, groaning and cursing; if I began to feel sexual pleasure rising in me, with sudden stealthy swiftness, as a candle flame may be stirred by an invisible breeze, if an overwhelming and obliterating sensation burst between my legs, I dared not scream; he didn't want his neighbors to hear me scream; if he closed his fingers around my throat he didn't want to hear me scream; if he spat into my mouth that seemed to him, in orgasm, ugly and gaping as a fish's mouth, he did not want to hear me scream; he would fill my small mouth with his tongue; he would fill my small gagging mouth with his cock; my dry mouth filled with his immense tongue; my dry mouth filled with his immense cock; he would spill all that had been jealously hoarded of himself into me, that I might choke and drown; yet whimpering almost saying Oh Jesus! almost saying my name almost saying Love, love you as if such forbidden words were snatched from him as his milky seed was snatched from him in the obliteration of orgasm always so much more powerful than one can anticipate, almost then he would say I love you Anellia. In his spidery fingers he would grip my back, my hips and buttocks so that the imprint of his fingers would remain for days, overlaid upon earlier bruises; lying above me, he'd arch his backbone like a bow, he would collapse upon me half-sobbing and delirious from that fall; from that height; he would bury his face in my neck; his groaning mouth, his teeth against my neck; he would press his hot face between my breasts that were chafed, aching; my nipples erect in arousal and fear; exhausted he would lie in my arms, defeated; I would stroke his hair I loved; his nubby tightly curly oily hair that was mine to stroke; I would cradle his heavy, carved-looking head that was mine to cradle
; my lover's thoughts came in slow languid waves now; the agitated surf had broken and was now waves; warm shallow waves; gazing slantwise at his face, from slightly above as I held him, I saw his tremulous eyelids; the life in those eyelids; the life of the eye, the vision, the brain inside those eyelids; I understood that it is only in such intimacy that we know another person; it is only in such intimacy that we know ourselves, in proximity to another person; the nakedness of lovers is the nakedness of a mother and her infant; the nakedness of lovers is that first nakedness, or it is nothing; which is why lovers will kill for it, to attain it and repudiate it; at last I would begin to speak, as Vernor's soul subsided and his eyelids stilled, drifting toward sleep; I spoke softly and quietly in the aftermath of lovemaking; I spoke wonderingly to my lover of things I had never seen but only imagined, a bright blue sea rippling in sunshine where on an extraordinary wide, white beach of a kind unknown in my experience, sand fine as confectioners' sugar, I ran splashing in the warm surf and cut my foot on a sea-shell of remarkable coral-pinkness and my mother who'd been running just behind me lifted me in her arms and kissed me as I cried more in surprise than in pain; though the pain came swiftly, throbbing through my foot; and my mother took me away to wash, and to kiss, the hurt little foot, and made it well; I told him of my mother who'd been only a girl embarking on a voyage, there in the waves I saw her but a hundred yards from shore, alone in a small rowboat, alone with a single oar, how had this happened? why was my mother so far away, and I was screaming for her on shore? my mother whose face was beautiful and loving though I could not see it clearly, a face flimsy (like all faces perhaps) as rice paper to be marred, torn almost by accident; I told Vernor of my father whose body I had not seen, in life (it seemed to me) as in death; a man with a heavy flushed face and his heart heavy inside him; the burden of that enlarged, heavy heart; yet he'd had a handsome face once; a face very different from Vernor's carved-wooden face; a face that seemed boneless, of muscle, gristle, and fat; a face smudged as in a charcoal drawing deliberately ruined; once I'd drawn my father in charcoal, at school; I'd drawn him from memory, brought it home to show the others and they'd been surprised at my skill, showed it to my father and he'd laughed shaking his head You got me there an expression I did not comprehend, and later that evening he'd asked to see it again and this time tore it in two; always I would recall my shock, the hurt of it, as my father tore his own face in two; always I would remember his angry laughing; yet if I cried, my tears were insincere for I'd guessed beforehand that I shouldn't have done it; shouldn't have drawn my father's face; it's a transgression to replicate your father's face if you reveal too much. Yet he'd seemed to love me, that day at high school graduation. Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short. I told my lover how at night in the country sometimes I would wake suddenly to hear Death outside in the cornstalks in the wind of late autumn; I heard Death entering my grandparents' farmhouse which was too flimsy to keep Death out; I lay awake in my bed too frightened to breathe listening to Death moving across the creaking floorboards downstairs; I prayed that Death would pass me by, and that Death would pass by the others in the house; my three tall brothers, my grandparents and, if he was home, my father; I saw that all who live lie very still in terror of Death at such times; waiting for Death to pass by, or waiting for Death to take another; as in a herd of beasts terrorized by predators there must be the single instinct-wish Take another! take another and not me! This was a secret of which adults would not speak; this was a secret known by children, and forgotten by adults; a secret of which the great philosophers would not speak because it is so stark, so simple; a secret lacking revelation.