At last his eyes became fixed on a small placard placed about a curtain. “Emergency Exit” was written there. Leaving his landlady’s side, he walked over to the turnstile. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, and then touched the man on the arm. “I feel ill,” he said, speaking very rapidly; “very ill indeed! It’s the atmosphere of this place. I want you to let me out by the quickest way. It would be a pity for me to faint here—especially with ladies about.” His left hand shot out and placed what he had been fumbling for in his pocket on the other’s bare palm. “I see there’s an emergency exit over there. Would it be possible for me to get out that way?”
“Well, yes, sir; I think so.” The man hesitated; he felt a slight, a very slight, feeling of misgiving. He looked at Daisy, flushed and smiling, happy and unconcerned, and then at Mrs. Bunting. She was very pale; but surely her lodger’s sudden seizure was enough to make her feel worried. Hopkins felt the half sovereign pleasantly tickling his palm. The Prefect of Police had given him only half a crown—mean, shabby foreigner!
“Yes, I can let you out that way,” he said at last, “and perhaps when you’re standing out in the air on the iron balcony you’ll feel better. But then, you know, sir, you’ll have to come round to the front if you want to come in again, for those emergency doors only open outward.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Sleuth hurriedly; “I quite understand! If I feel better I’ll come in by the front way, and pay another shilling—that’s only fair.”
“You needn’t do that if you’ll just explain what happened here.”
The man went and pulled the curtain aside, and put his shoulder against the door. It burst open, and the light for a moment blinded Mr. Sleuth. He passed his hand over his eyes.
“Thank you,” he said; “thank you. I shall get all right here.”
* * *
—
Five days later Bunting identified the body of a man found drowned in the Regent’s Canal as that of his late lodger; and, the morning following, a gardener working in the Regent’s Park found a newspaper in which were wrapped, together with a half-worn pair of rubber-soled shoes, two surgical knives. This fact was not chronicled in any newspaper; but a very pretty and picturesque paragraph went the round of the press, about the same time, concerning a small box filled with sovereigns which had been forwarded anonymously to the Governor of the Foundling Hospital.
Mr. and Mrs. Bunting are now in the service of an old lady, by whom they are feared as well as respected, and whom they make very comfortable.
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
JOYCE CAROL OATES
THE STORY
Original publication: Epoch, Fall 1966; first collected in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Stories of Young America by Joyce Carol Oates (Greenwich, CT, Fawcett, 1974)
ARGUABLY THE GREATEST LIVING WRITER in the world to have not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (she has been regarded as a favorite by readers, critics, and bookies for more than three decades), Joyce Carol Oates (1938– ) has enjoyed a career known for its excellence, popularity, and prolificacy.
Born in Lockport, New York, in the northwestern part of the state, she began to write as a young child, attended Syracuse University on scholarship, and won a Mademoiselle magazine short story award at nineteen. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), has been followed by more than a hundred books, including novels, short story collections, children’s books, young adult novels, volumes of poetry, collections of essays and criticism, and volumes of plays; eleven of her novels of suspense were released under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Laura Kelly. An overwhelming number of her novels and short stories feature such subjects as violence, sexual abuse, murder, racial tensions, and class conflicts. Many of her fictional works have been based on real-life incidents, including violent crimes.
As prolific as her writing career has been, so, too, has been the extraordinary number of major literary prizes and honors awarded to her, including a National Book Award for them (1969), as well as five other nominations, five Pulitzer Prize nominations, two O. Henry Awards for short stories (twenty-nine nominations), and a National Humanities Medal. Among her bestselling books are We Were the Mulvaneys (1996; released on film in 2002 with Beau Bridges and Blythe Danner), and Blonde (2000–2001 miniseries with Poppy Montgomery), a novel based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. The 1996 film Foxfire (starring Cathy Moriarty, Hedy Burress, and Angelina Jolie) was an adaptation of Oates’s 1993 novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a coming-of-age story that in the hands of Oates adds a layer of difficulty and complexity to an already confusing time for young adults.
Bestselling writer Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, described “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” as the story that most influenced her writing. “I’d never had that experience where my blood changed temperature in my veins. I’ve probably reread it a hundred times since then and still can’t figure out how it’s done.”
THE FILM
Title: Smooth Talk, 1985
Studio: American Playhouse, Goldcrest Films
Director: Joyce Chopra
Screenwriter: Tom Cole
Producer: Martin Rosen
THE CAST
• Treat Williams (Arnold Friend)
• Laura Dern (Connie)
• Mary Kay Place (Katherine)
Few authors can create suspense as effectively as Joyce Carol Oates, and this is true in her original story, just as it is in the film inspired by it, which closely follows the story except for a very different ending, which was probably needed for the cinematic version. It should be noted that in much of Oates’s fiction, the terror comes slowly, not suddenly, as events slowly gyre out of control.
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was loosely based on the real-life murders committed by Charles Schmid in Tucson in 1964 and 1965. Known as “The Pied Piper of Tucson” because his charm and charisma were attractive to so many friends and young women, he was a smooth talker who had several girlfriends. He decided to kill a high school student just to know how it felt to kill someone. He later confessed the crime to a girlfriend but, when he broke up with her, she threatened to tell on him, so he killed her, too, as well as her sister.
Schmid inspired the creation of Arnold Friend—remove the letter r from his names for a definition of the character.
In the story and in the film, a teenager is experiencing a burgeoning sexuality and flirts with boys until she ambiguously rejects in a flirty manner an older man who is not so easily put off.
Smooth Talk won the Grand Jury Prize Dramatic at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival.
WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
Joyce Carol Oates
HER NAME WAS CONNIE. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous, giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn’t much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. “Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you’re so pretty?” she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.
“Why don’t you keep your room clean like your sister? How’ve you got your hair fixed—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don’t see your sister using that junk.”
Her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn’t bad enough—
with her in the same building—she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother and her mother’s sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and Connie couldn’t do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams. Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn’t bother talking much to them, but around his bent head Connie’s mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over. “She makes me want to throw up sometimes,” she complained to her friends. She had a high, breathless, amused voice that made everything she said sound a little forced, whether it was sincere or not.
There was one good thing: June went places with girlfriends of hers, girls who were just as plain and steady as she, and so when Connie wanted to do that her mother had no objections. The father of Connie’s best girlfriend drove the girls the three miles to town and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie, and when he came to pick them up again at eleven he never bothered to ask what they had done.
They must have been familiar sights, walking around the shopping plaza in their shorts and flat ballerina slippers that always scuffed the sidewalk, with charm bracelets jingling on their thin wrists; they would lean together to whisper and laugh secretly if someone passed who amused or interested them. Connie had long dark blond hair that drew anyone’s eye to it, and she wore part of it pulled up on her head and puffed out and the rest of it she let fall down her back. She wore a pull-over jersey blouse that looked one way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home. Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home—“Ha, ha, very funny”—but highpitched and nervous anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.
Sometimes they did go shopping or to a movie, but sometimes they went across the highway, ducking fast across the busy road, to a drive-in restaurant where older kids hung out. The restaurant was shaped like a big bottle, though squatter than a real bottle, and on its cap was a revolving figure of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft. One night in midsummer they ran across, breathless with daring, and right away someone leaned out a car window and invited them over, but it was just a boy from high school they didn’t like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him. They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the counter and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.
A boy named Eddie came in to talk with them. He sat backwards on his stool, turning himself jerkily around in semicircles and then stopping and turning back again, and after a while he asked Connie if she would like something to eat. She said she would and so she tapped her friend’s arm on her way out—her friend pulled her face up into a brave, droll look—and Connie said she would meet her at eleven, across the way. “I just hate to leave her like that,” Connie said earnestly, but the boy said that she wouldn’t be alone for long. So they went out to his car, and on the way Connie couldn’t help but let her eyes wander over the windshields and faces all around her, her face gleaming with a joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place; it might have been the music. She drew her shoulders up and sucked in her breath with the pure pleasure of being alive, and just at that moment she happened to glance at a face just a few feet from hers. It was a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold. He stared at her and then his lips widened into a grin. Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn’t help glancing back and there he was, still watching her. He wagged a finger and laughed and said, “Gonna get you, baby,” and Connie turned away again without Eddie noticing anything.
She spent three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and drank Cokes in wax cups that were always sweating, and then down an alley a mile or so away, and when he left her off at five to eleven only the movie house was still open at the plaza. Her girlfriend was there, talking with a boy. When Connie came up, the two girls smiled at each other and Connie said, “How was the movie?” and the girl said, “You should know.” They rode off with the girl’s father, sleepy and pleased, and Connie couldn’t help but look back at the darkened shopping plaza with its big empty parking lot and its signs that were faded and ghostly now, and over at the drive-in restaurant where cars were still circling tirelessly. She couldn’t hear the music at this distance.
Next morning June asked her how the movie was and Connie said, “So-so.”
She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the house—it was summer vacation—getting in her mother’s way and thinking, dreaming about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July. Connie’s mother kept dragging her back to the daylight by finding things for her to do or saying suddenly, “What’s this about the Pettinger girl?”
And Connie would say nervously, “Oh, her. That dope.” She always drew thick clear lines between herself and such girls, and her mother was simple and kind enough to believe it. Her mother was so simple, Connie thought, that it was maybe cruel to fool her so much. Her mother went scuffling around the house in old bedroom slippers and complained over the telephone to one sister about the other, then the other called up and the two of them complained about the third one. If June’s name was mentioned her mother’s tone was approving, and if Connie’s name was mentioned it was disapproving. This did not really mean she disliked Connie, and actually Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June just because she was prettier, but the two of them kept up a pretense of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of little value to either of them. Sometimes, over coffee, they were almost friends, but something would come up—some vexation that was like a fly buzzing suddenly around their heads—and their faces went hard with contempt.
One Sunday Connie got up at eleven—none of them bothered with church—and washed her hair so that it could dry all day long in the sun. Her parents and sister were going to a barbecue at an aunt’s house and Connie said no, she wasn’t interested, rolling her eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it. “Stay home alone then,” her mother said sharply. Connie sat out back in a lawn chair and watched them drive away, her father quiet and bald, hunched around so that he could back the car out, her mother with a look that was still angry and not at all softened through the windshield, and in the back seat poor old June, all dressed up as if she didn’t know what a barbecue was, with all the running yelling kids and the flies. Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was, the backyard ran off into weeds and a fence-like line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue and still. The asbestos “ranch house” that was now thre
e years old startled her—it looked small. She shook her head as if to get awake.
It was too hot. She went inside the house and turned on the radio to drown out the quiet. She sat on the edge of her bed, barefoot, and listened for an hour and a half to a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs she sang along with, interspersed by exclamations from “Bobby King”: “An’ look here, you girls at Napoleon’s—Son and Charley want you to pay real close attention to this song coming up!”
And Connie paid close attention herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly about the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.
After a while she heard a car coming up the drive. She sat up at once, startled, because it couldn’t be her father so soon. The gravel kept crunching all the way in from the road—the driveway was long—and Connie ran to the window. It was a car she didn’t know. It was an open jalopy, painted a bright gold that caught the sunlight opaquely. Her heart began to pound and her fingers snatched at her hair, checking it, and she whispered, “Christ, Christ,” wondering how bad she looked. The car came to a stop at the side door and the horn sounded four short taps, as if this were a signal Connie knew.
She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen door, her bare toes curling down off the step. There were two boys in the car and now she recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig and he was grinning at her.
“I ain’t late, am I?” he said.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Connie said.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 57
