The Man Without a Shadow

by Joyce Carol Oates

  What if, one day, Margot Sharpe is exposed as having behaved in a way some might condemn as unethical, even immoral; what if she is condemned for scientific misconduct, with her own amnesiac subject, posthumously?

  Yet—she can’t break off her feelings for E.H. No one else in her compressed circle of a life means so much to her.

  Watching E.H. she murmurs aloud—“‘Ah love, let us be true to one another!’” The rest of the poem, the melancholy beauty of the language, is lost to her.

  But E.H. is touched by these words which he doesn’t recall having uttered within the hour; he is drawn to touch Margot’s cheek, tenderly—“My dear love, let us be true to one another—yes.”

  E.H. returns then to his work. But soon, E.H. becomes distracted, distressed. He has been sketching too intensely perhaps and now his fingers ache; he flexes them, and stretches his arms. Abruptly he shuts the sketchbook and rests it against the plank railing. What is he thinking? Margot wonders. What has surfaced in his mind, like an emerging light? Is thought a kind of light, a leaping of neurons? Electrical currents? Where does thought abide, and out of what wordless region does thought arise? She feels a powerful love for this brave man who stands alone, as on the brink of an abyss. She observes him as he grips the plank railing of the bridge as if to brace himself against the wind—but there is no wind. He peers out into the marshland, frowning. Margot supposes that, if she were to approach him, daring to interrupt his solitude, she would see that his facial expression is intense, anxious; she would see that he is no one she knows.

  By this time Margot has drifted out of the amnesiac’s peripheral vision. It is a sad, yet sweet, swooning sensation as she feels herself drifting out of his consciousness. How like a moon, in a lunar eclipse! Yet, though Margot is effaced, she does not cease to exist. Rather, she is in a suspended state, until the man sees her.

  “Mr. Hoopes? Eli? Hello.”

  E.H. turns. He is startled by her, perhaps for a moment he is mystified and even frightened but soon he is smiling eagerly and hopefully.

  “Hel-lo.”

  SHE HAS BROUGHT a present for him.

  She has brought a present for him which must remain our secret.

  When they are far from the Institute, and on the plank bridge, and Margot is satisfied that no one is in sight, she removes from her shoulder bag two small items of jewelry: two rings.

  Wedding bands, in silver. Not expensive but tasteful, beautiful. A Celtic pattern, the silversmith told her.

  “For you, dear Eli. And for me.”

  She has measured E.H.’s finger, and so has purchased a ring that fits perfectly, as her own matching ring fits perfectly. She slips the ring on E.H.’s finger, the third finger of his left hand; and Eli takes the other ring from her, to slip on the third finger of Margot’s left hand.

  E.H. kisses the palm of Margot’s hand. He is quivering with emotion, and with desire. Margot kisses both the palm and the back of E.H.’s hand; the knuckles are covered in fair brown hairs.

  “Doctor, you are so beautiful! I love you! Are we married now?”

  “Yes, Eli. We are married now.”

  She pulls at his hand, that has gripped her hand so tightly. She kisses his mouth, that kisses her greedily in return. The man has been pulling, tugging roughly, at her clothing. He has been making a pained, whimpering sound. He is very aroused. Margot feels a thrill of desire deep in the pit of her belly, a small flame about to flare into the most intense pleasure. Blindly Margot leads the man deeper into the woods, though the ground is marshy underfoot. She finds a place for them to lower themselves, clumsily but eagerly; below a gigantic white oak amid a patch of splotched sunshine.

  For a long time then they lose themselves. Margot hears herself cry out, a hoarse guttural cry, scarcely recognizable as human. The man’s cry is softer, a hissing sigh. She will hear that sound, that faint hissing of breath, like the hissing escape of a soul. A shadow passes over Margot’s brain, her brain is cleaved, obliterated. She cannot speak. Her face is wet with tears. Her lower body is ablaze with sexual sensation, her legs are weak, fainting. She must straighten E.H.’s disheveled clothing, and her own. She must tamp down his hair, and her own. Their hands scramble at each other’s body like ravenous creatures. When they emerge from their secret place they are breathless, as if they’ve been running for their lives. Laughter catches in their throats like sobs.

  Oh what have we done. What has happened to us.

  It is no one’s fault, it will not happen again.

  Of course it will happen again—and again, again . . .

  E.H. is rapt with love for her whose name he has forgotten. How terrible it must be for the man, Margot thinks, to love someone for whom he has no name.

  “Wait. Wait please. Come back. Please.”

  “No, Eli. We can’t.”

  “But why not? You are my wife, aren’t you?”

  “Only in secret, Eli. No one must know.”

  “Really! Is that it.” E.H. is suddenly resigned, stoic. He does not resist when Margot works the wedding band off his finger and slips it, with her own, into a zippered pocket in her shoulder bag.

  “No, Eli. We must go back now.”

  “Yes. ‘Must go back now.’”

  Margot has straightened his clothing, and combed his lank, thinning hair. She jokes that Eli’s hair was once much longer—“You were a hippie, darling. You wore a red headband. But you were reckless with your life.” She has kissed the myriad bruises on his arms and chest. She has brought a tube of Arnica montana, to massage into the bruises.

  Her own hair she has brushed with a small brush out of her bag. The single, tight-braided plait falls against her eye and stings. There are nettles on her clothing and yes, damn!—in her hair. It will require many brushings and fine-tooth combings to rid herself of the nettles.

  Quickly Margot leads E.H. back to the plank bridge, and to the wood chip path. Quickly, for it is suddenly late afternoon, and the staff at the Institute will begin to wonder where they are. (Margot has been telling them that she is testing E.H. on another floor, in a rehab learning lab suitable for her purposes. But she has been vague about this place, and is hoping no one will question her about it.)

  “Eli, hurry! We must get back.”

  “Back—where? Are we living in Philadelphia now? In Rittenhouse Square?”

  “No, Eli. Not in Rittenhouse Square.”

  “Were we married there? Is that our home together?”

  E.H. is becoming confused, distressed. Margot loves the man fiercely but she is fearful of their secret being revealed. She thinks—I will take him home with me, one day. We will be truly married and what I have done now will be redeemed.

  Alone in the elevator ascending to the fourth floor Margot dares to kiss E.H. a final time, gently pushing her tongue into his mouth, and when he embraces her tightly, she pushes him from her. “No. We can’t, Eli. They will discover us, and take you from me.” Seeing the look of dismay and confusion in the man’s face she relents; she dares to take both his hands in hers and brings them together against her midriff and her breasts, in a swooning sensation.

  It is nearly the fourth floor. Within a few seconds, the door will open.

  “Are you my dear wife, Doctor? I love you.”

  “Eli, I love you.”

  LOVEMAKING WITHOUT WORDS. Without speech, memory.

  And afterward, she must never forget to remove their rings.

  What passes between us will not be recorded. It will be lost to all memory.

  YET, IT HAPPENS that Margot Sharpe can’t resist confiding in one individual.

  “I think—at last—I am in love . . .”

  For she must tell him. That he will not continue to think that he should feel guilty about his treatment of her, and wish to avoid her as he has been doing.

  “Are you, Margot! This is very good news.”

  His voice suggests surprise. And not such clear relief in the surprise as Margot might have anticipated.


  “Is he anyone I know? At the university? Not in the department—I hope?”

  They laugh together. Their history together includes much talk of the department that is amusing, exasperating, and semi-scandalous.

  During the brief interlude they were lovers Milton Ferris quite enjoyed astonishing the much younger Margot Sharpe with tales of his older, distinguished colleagues. Tales from the perspective of Milton Ferris when he’d been young himself, a junior faculty member. The Father indoctrinating the Chaste Daughter into the history of their shared terrain, of which the Chaste Daughter has been mostly ignorant.

  “Well, Margot! Will you be—getting married?”

  (She has seen Milton glance surreptitiously at her left hand. But there is no ring on the third finger of that hand.)

  “We are looking to that, yes. Soon, I hope.”

  “Soon? How soon? Will I still be here to help you celebrate?”

  Margot stares at Milton, smiling uncertainly. Still be here?—for a moment she thinks that Milton is referring to his age—his mortality. Then, she realizes he means something far less extreme, and must disguise her look of alarm.

  “I’m afraid not, Milton. I think you’re leaving too soon . . .”

  Bathed in post–Nobel Prize celebrity, Milton Ferris has retired from the university with much acclaim. He has given interviews in which he speaks of having “passed on” his famous memory lab to younger colleagues; sometimes he names Margot Sharpe as his “successor” at the university, which is deeply gratifying to her, and fills her with a kind of exalted anxiety. At Milton’s Festschrift it was joked—affectionately, if with a mild edge—that Milton Ferris is the Genghis Khan of neuropsychology, populating the science world with his DNA—his descendants.

  It is the twilight of the great scientist’s career. Though Milton has accepted a part-time position at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., and there is a rumor that he will soon be appointed by the president to serve on a prestigious national science committee. A rumor too that he will divide his time between a town house in Georgetown, D.C., and an oceanfront condominium in Boca Raton, Florida, where his aging, ailing, longtime wife is living close by the Ferrises’ married daughter and her family.

  Margot Sharpe finds it painful to think of Milton Ferris as “retired.” She does not accept that this is the “twilight” of her mentor’s career. Though young scientists who would once have worked with Milton Ferris now work with Margot Sharpe who is understood to be Milton Ferris’s “daughter.”

  How guilty she feels, sometimes! She has no idea why.

  She’d defended Milton against the erroneous charges of scientific misconduct, but perhaps she had not been adamant enough. She had not summoned the courage to tell him.

  How furious he would have been! How deeply, irrevocably wounded. I could not do that to him, even if I no longer loved him.

  Margot has never known if Milton knows about the alleged charges brought against him by former students and associates whom he’d trusted, and whom he’d helped with their careers; Margot supposes, given the web of relationships and intimacies in Milton Ferris’s life, that he must know, or suspect—something. By this time, in the aftermath of the Nobel Prize, which bathes its recipients in something like armor, someone surely must have told him—some loyal former student wishing to curry favor with the great Milton Ferris and strike a blow against rivals; and yet Margot Sharpe, who has been so close to Milton, and so fiercely loyal to him, could not bring herself to tell him. And Alvin Kaplan, one of those who’d loved him, and had betrayed him, certainly could not have told him.

  In the end, evidently there wasn’t enough substance to the charges. Not only Margot Sharpe but another former (female) student of Ferris’s, now a distinguished psychologist at Harvard, refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing on Ferris’s part, and threatened to “go public” with her own countercharges if the investigation continued. Margot knows who this person is, and is both impressed and troubled by the woman’s loyalty; she tortures herself with the probability that Milton must have had an affair with this woman too, just a year or two before his affair with Margot, but she doesn’t care to know details.

  Nor does she want Milton Ferris to know details of her new love.

  Her passionate, doomed and deranged love for Elihu Hoopes.

  For all love is a derangement of the senses, else it is not love but only sentiment.

  Margot smiles. There is a faint buzzing in her ears. As Milton Ferris regards her quizzically.

  (He has aged, she sees. A slight tremor in his left hand, and a near-imperceptible quiver of his eyelids. Telltale bruises of the elderly visible on his hands, symptoms of blood-thinning medication.)

  (Oh but he has not aged, much. She is relieved to see!)

  “He is—he isn’t?—a scientist?”

  “No. Not a scientist.”

  Margot speaks quietly. The Chaste Daughter is soft-voiced.

  “Really! You surprise me, Margot.”

  Is that good, or rather not-so-good? Margot sees her elderly mentor frown. His hair is thinning-white, lifting in airy waves above his pink scalp; his teeth are impossibly white, ceramic-perfect.

  The broad forehead crinkles in disapproval. The genial banter has ceased. Margot is forced to think yes, she has disappointed Milton Ferris, she has failed him, for clearly something has gone terribly wrong in the life of a (female) scientist if she must content herself with a civilian companion, and not another scientist.

  Margot thinks—God damn you, I am not going to apologize for loving E.H.!

  “I hope you will be happy, Margot. You are a woman of great intelligence and integrity—you are a lovely woman whom I lacked the imagination to make happy, I think. I am so sorry about that.”

  Gravely Milton Ferris speaks, like one about to give a blessing, then reconsidering. His words can’t possibly be sincere, and yet—Milton looks so very penitent, almost you might believe him.

  Margot has heard rumors that Milton Ferris has had health problems; on the very eve of the Nobel announcement, he’d been scheduled for an MRI at the University Hospital. His old ebullience has subsided into a kind of benevolent glow; even his wiry white beard seems to have thinned, and his fleshy chin and raddled neck are exposed beneath. And the tremor in his hand—Margot will not see.

  I loved you, you know.

  I will always love you.

  Does Milton Ferris understand this? Very likely, he who has published crucial work on meta-linguistic psychology will have no difficulty understanding Margot Sharpe.

  It is time to leave—is it? Margot feels a pang of dismay.

  Quickly before Milton departs, Margot congratulates him another time on the Nobel Prize—as others have, countless times. A deafening chorus. Almost there must be something terrifying in such congratulations, that sweep away all distinctions other than that of the great, grand prize; as if the scientist’s other, important and influential work had never been, and the prize itself something of a posthumous acknowledgment, since for some reason known only to the Nobel science committee, Milton Ferris received the award for “original, groundbreaking research” he’d done at least thirty years before in collaboration with other scientists, now elderly.

  “Well, dear Margot! One day, maybe—for your remarkable work on E.H.—you.”

  It is a sweetly gallant wish. The quiver in both eyelids gives Milton Ferris a sly, foxy look.

  At parting they are suddenly shy. (Is anyone watching? They are in a quasi-public place.) But Margot knows that if she shrinks away foolishly, she will regret it; and Milton seems to feel the same way, for he clasps one of her hands in both his hands, and leans forward to brush his surprisingly chilly lips against her cheek.

  “Good-bye, dear Margot! And congratulations on—whatever this is, that has come into your life so deservedly.”

  DOES HE KNOW, of course not. Could he guess, not ever.

  “E.H.”—his amnesiac subject!

  Though Milto
n Ferris cannot know that Margot Sharpe is in love with Elihu Hoopes, he knows that Margot Sharpe is still in love with him.

  Margot smiles, considering. She regrets nothing, for what is there to regret? Her life lies before her.

  Sipping whiskey until her eyelids droop, and it is time to sleep.

  SEXUAL NATURE OF the Amnesiac Subject E.H. Of myriad proposals that were made to Milton Ferris by research psychologists at rival institutions, the one that most offended Margot Sharpe was from a clinical psychologist at a distinguished Ivy League university requesting the opportunity to test and measure the brain-damaged subject’s “sex-drive,” “sex-fantasies,” and “sex-potency.” When the proposal was read to the lab by a bemused Ferris, Margot Sharpe, thirty years old at the time, was particularly upset—“That would be a terrible exploitation of Elihu Hoopes! He trusts us, and his family trusts us. He is a human being, not a research animal.”

  Milton Ferris had been surprised by his young colleague’s vehemence, for Margot Sharpe was usually, in his presence, very quiet and unassuming. But he’d been impressed with her integrity and her passion. (As he would later tell her, in the brief interlude when they were lovers.)

  At the time he’d laughed heartily at the young scientist’s indignation. All of the lab had laughed. He wasn’t going to invite a rival to examine our amnesiac—no fear of that.

  Now that Milton Ferris has retired from the university and Margot Sharpe has become principal investigator of Project E.H., and “E.H.” has become ever more famous in neuropsychological quarters, Margot is deluged with proposals as offensive as that proposal, or worse. She fears what would happen to E.H. if she were not there to protect him; she fears that his elderly aunt Lucinda, like his other Hoopes relatives, could have no idea of the intricacies and (possible) duplicities of the highly competitive world of research science, and might unwittingly give permission to the wrong people. She is sure that, without her constant vigilance, the identity of “Elihu Hoopes” would be known to the world by now, and unwanted, unscrupulous sensation-seekers would be flocking to the Institute at Darven Park or worse yet, to the austere old English Tudor house in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. And the amnesiac subject, with his short-term memory of less than seventy seconds, would not remember any outrage perpetrated upon him, unless he recorded it in his notebook or sketchbook.