Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She did not want the man in her life, yet she had allowed the man in her life. And now by degrees she could not bear losing the man, whom she had allowed in her life.

  She didn’t want to be with him, really—she was awkward in his company, always anxious, unsettled. Especially she didn’t want to swim in the University pool at the desperate hour of 7 A.M. yet there she was lowering herself into the lapping aqua water that felt unnaturally soft, dizzy from the smell of chlorine, bizarre thoughts like sea serpents assailing her as she swam laps—arm over arm, Australian crawl, eyes fluttering shut—Will we be married? Is that what will happen? Is that why I am here? On the mosaic ceiling of the University pool and on the upper walls were rippling reflections like quivering nerves. The smell of chlorine and the echo-chamber of the pool reminded her of high school in Carthage which caught at her heart, this was not a memory M.R. wished to revive in her new life. Especially she dreaded the isolation of the swimmer, amid propelled and splashing figures yet she was isolated, always one is isolated in the water where thoughts await like froth on the surface of the water that smelled like chemicals. It will happen, then. The man makes a claim.

  She had only to not-resist. She felt a thrill of excitement, a childish vindication like one who has tightened a noose around her neck ever tighter, tighter—if her (secret) lover would not leave his wife for her, another man would claim her; M.R. could not resist this other man if only to demonstrate her ability to love another man—wasn’t this proof?

  M.R. had never asked Andre Litovik to leave his wife for her. For her—that would not have seemed possible.

  The wife, like the son, was unwell. Though Andre did not speak in such clinical terms, scarcely did he speak of his “difficult”—“temperamental”—wife at all, Meredith surmised that the wife suffered from something resembling bipolar disorder.

  A very fashionable malady, in intellectual circles.

  For the son, there was no diagnosis that Andre Litovik would accept.

  M.R. shuddered to think—If something should happen to the son. To either of them. And Andre were—free . . .

  She would know, then: if he loved her.

  Or, rather: she could not deceive herself about knowing, in such circumstances.

  Thinking of these matters, that were disturbing to her, yet familiar-disturbing, like snarls in her hair when she’d been a girl, that no amount of combing seemed to dispel for long, M.R. was swimming quite capably—vehemently. Despite her self-consciousness she was a quite good swimmer. She’d been a high school athlete—though not on the girls’ swimming team, for she’d been too self-conscious about her solid, flat-breasted body in a clinging swimsuit, for all to see—and retained still a young athlete’s coordination. To Oliver Kroll’s surprise M.R. was swimming laps nearly as well as he did—and Oliver had happened to mention that, as a Yale undergraduate, he was told he might have been a candidate for the Olympic swim team if he’d had time to train—“Of course, that was a long time ago.”

  Olympics? Swim team? M.R. wondered how this could be. Of course, she said nothing.

  Kroll was impressed by M.R.’s swimming. His eyes on her body—the unflattering single-piece swimsuit of some polyester fabric resembling a thin sort of reptile hide; the fleshy dimpled thighs that seemed to explode out of the suit, the small high hard breasts, shapely upper arms—Kroll gazed at her blinking. “Hey. ‘Meredith.’ You’re beautiful.”

  Even at such a time, meaning to flatter, Kroll could not speak without sounding ironic, insincere.

  In embarrassment M.R. laughed, turning away. She’d managed to push—shove—her thick hair up inside a rubber bathing cap that felt distended, like an encephalitic brain. She was not beautiful and was made uneasy by the claim—she had no wish to try to live up to such a claim.

  What a farce! Masquerade . . .

  Kroll never swam less than a mile, he’d said. For the sake of his back. When at last he climbed out of the pool M.R. saw how water streamed from his hard-muscled legs; the long dark hairs of his legs flat against his pale skin, glistening with moisture. She saw the just slightly flabby flesh at his waist, the bulge of his groin, and the antic hairs of his thighs that descended from it. . . . She felt an unexpected tenderness for the man: his maleness.

  At a short distance of fifteen or twenty feet, M.R. liked Kroll best. She felt her heart expand with an emotion she could not have named—not love, not sexual desire, but a wish to touch, and to protect; a wish to console. She thought there could be nothing more tender between a man and a woman, than this wish to console.

  It was missing from her relationship with Andre. He did not ever think to console her.

  He did not ever think that M.R. was anyone other than a strapping young Amazon who did not require such coddling.

  Nor would Andre have wished M.R. to console him.

  Kroll saw M.R. gazing at him—(though she was not thinking of him but of the other, her astronomer-lover)—and smiled, tentatively. There was a leap of sexual interest between them—suddenly.

  M.R. knew, from her limited experience with men, which was more or less her experience with her long-married astronomer-lover, that a man is very easily flattered, sexually; as a man is very easily satisfied, sexually. As in a droll but unsettling Magritte painting the man’s squinty eyes were mimicked—mirrored—in the small nubby nipples of his flat male breasts which she wanted, impulsively, to touch—to stroke. To kiss?

  He’d been married before—“Too young.”

  He’d been divorced—“Not so young.”

  Divorced now for eleven years. And no children—“Fortunately.”

  “Why ‘fortunately’?”

  “Because we’d still be married now, possibly. And I wouldn’t have met you.”

  Offhandedly Kroll spoke. It was left to the woman—to M.R.—to speculate whether he spoke sincerely, or just offhandedly.

  He wasn’t emotionally involved with his ex-wife, Kroll said. But he had no interest in talking about her, or his “failed” marriage. Nor did Kroll ask M.R. about former lovers, or if she’d been married.

  That day he’d been lecturing on Hobbes. Theories of humankind as machines lacking free will, “soul.” He quite liked Hobbes’s famous—infamous—aphorism: Life is nasty, brutish, and short. You could see that Kroll liked this aphorism as it applied to others, unlike himself.

  Kroll said: “If man is a machine, man can be manipulated. For his own good, man can be manipulated. You’ve said you aren’t religious, Meredith? But what do you believe?”

  “I’m—not sure what I believe.”

  She told Kroll that her parents were Quakers but that she was not a Quaker though she respected the religion for its civility, sanity.

  “Quakers value the commonweal over the individual—that isn’t very American. We are a nation of individuals.”

  Kroll, the libertarian, disagreed: “All nations are nations of individuals—unless they’re nations of ants.”

  He’d discovered an article that M.R. had published in Ethics—“Kant’s Moral Imperative and ‘Right to Life’ ”—he’d thought it was a very interesting essay, and wondered why M.R. had not mentioned it to him, or given him an offprint.

  M.R. said she’d meant to mention it to him. She was intending to give him an offprint.

  M.R. said she’d thought of the article as an exercise, or an experiment—“I was exploring the problem as it might be explored from various ethical viewpoints. But I don’t ‘believe’ the conclusion—necessarily.”

  “You don’t ‘believe’ the conclusion? Then—why did you write the article?”

  “Because I was exploring ethical issues. I was not arguing for one side or another.”

  “And what is the purpose of that? ‘Exploring’?”

  “That is—philosophy. There is a ‘philosophy of ethics’—as there is a ‘philosophy of physics’—or a
‘philosophy of law.’ ”

  “But there is ‘ethics’ too—primarily. Isn’t there?”

  “ ‘Primarily’?—I’m not sure.”

  “In politics, that’s all there is—sides. The quest for power—and then, the determination to keep it.”

  “Power! Not only does power ‘corrupt,’ power ‘blinds.’ If it’s truth that is the goal, power is a disability.”

  M.R. protested: philosophy could be approached as a series of problems for which there were no specific answers. Questions, and not answers. Many of her colleagues were exploring such problems, some of them were exploring metaphysical “counter-worlds”—in the pursuit of abstract truth.

  “And what is a ‘counter-world’? What I think it is?” Kroll smiled, vastly amused.

  “A counter-world is a possibility of a—a world . . . A universe. . . .”

  “Bullshit, darling.” Crudely Kroll laughed, like one who wants you to know you haven’t put anything over on him. “This ‘right-to-life’ movement—let’s say in America, right now—you are either for it, or against it. You are either pro-abortion, or anti-abortion.”

  “Not pro-abortion but pro-choice. The issue is—pro-choice.”

  “Your article suggests that you are not pro-choice—if I understand it correctly. Kant’s ‘moral imperative’—we should never act unless our actions constitute a principle for all other human beings—if you take that as an ideal, you can hardly be pro-choice for you’d have wanted, in your own case, to be born—not aborted. Yes?”

  “But I don’t take it as an ‘ideal’—only as a philosophical proposition.”

  “Have you ever been pregnant, Meredith?”

  The question came so abruptly, M.R. hadn’t time to be shocked, or insulted. Not very convincingly she stammered, “N-no.”

  “No? Well. You don’t have a perspective, then. Maybe that’s why you’re irresolute.”

  “ ‘Irresolution’ isn’t the—the issue. I mean, ‘irresolution’ isn’t the precise term. . . .”

  “ ‘Objectivity’ then? In ethical matters, as in political matters, there is no ‘objectivity.’ ”

  Still Kroll smiled, amused. M.R. tried to explain that, in an experiment, the experimenter doesn’t know what the results of the experiment will be, beforehand. In philosophy, if one is exploring the possibilities of a position. . . . Kroll brushed aside her faltering words like one brushing away gnats.

  “Bullshit, darling. And you know it.”

  M.R. thought she would not see Kroll again. In the wake of his presence she was unsettled, often sleepless. She didn’t want this intimacy. Yet then, when he called her, she heard her eager voice say yes.

  The pale-blue hydrangea had faded, died. M.R. worried that she’d forgotten to water it—unless she’d over-watered it. She hurried to a florist’s to buy a replacement, the identical shade of blue. She reasoned that Kroll couldn’t have told the difference even if he’d been suspicious, which he was not. He continued to check the soil with his forefinger.

  In late October, M.R. invited Kroll to dinner at her house.

  The first time she’d prepared a meal for any man except Andre Litovik—(but not, for Andre, in this house)—and she’d felt an illicit sort of excitement purchasing groceries in the better of the local food stores pushing a cart amid other women who were very likely wives, mothers, lovers—women caught up in the drama of lives with men.

  Which maybe she’d envied, in the past. A life entwined with another’s life, however unpredictable.

  For Kroll was unpredictable. Kroll was a man of moods. Often Kroll was impatient, obscurely discontented. Half-consciously he deflected her questions to him—what was wrong?—was he upset?—and at times, if she touched his arm, he seemed to shrink from her. Often to M.R. he seemed to be bringing—as in an embrace out of which clumsy objects were spilling, falling and shattering—a mysterious residue of irritation, annoyance, barely suppressed fury that had little to do with her.

  Except of course she was the woman.

  If she’d felt envy for the role of woman that envy dissolved now into an excited apprehension/anxiety, for Oliver Kroll was not easy to please, and the ways in which he might be displeased, or disappointed, were largely unpredictable. For dinner that evening Kroll brought a bottle of French wine—M.R. supposed it was expensive red wine, though she knew little of wine; she drank less than a half-glass, and distractedly, which must have annoyed Kroll for he lapsed into a brooding sort of silence. When M.R. asked him what was wrong he said, with a twist of a smile, “What d’you mean—‘what’s wrong’?—nothing is wrong, with me.”

  He had a way of staring at her—coldly, without evident recognition. While M.R. smiled a strained hopeful girl-smile—wondering if the effort, the continued effort, was worth it.

  With Andre, moods were all, also. But Andre’s moods tended to be capacious, magnanimous—wind blowing through a house, flinging open French windows, slamming doors—a rattling bustle on all sides. Kroll’s moods were tightly executed like a man opening an umbrella in a cramped space.

  Near the end of an evening, Kroll might say suddenly that he had to leave—he had work to do. Quickly he was on his feet, rattling car keys in his hand and eager to go. At such a moment he might hold M.R.’s hand, stroke her arm—he might kiss her. M.R. allowed herself to be kissed and M.R. kissed the man in return, as if with feeling. Well, in fact—with feeling. For she did feel an attraction to Oliver Kroll—she thought she did.

  She would allow him to make love to her—would she?—if she could bear it. She would allow this, it had to be done. For it wasn’t a normal relationship between adults, female and male, if there was no lovemaking—or some gesture in that direction.

  M.R.’s adoration of her (secret) lover was unquestioning, an adoration of his soul. As the soul was inhabited inside the body, M.R. might adore the body as well.

  Kroll was a different matter, very different from Andre. She had no sense of Kroll’s soul—it might have been teaspoon-sized, or the size and width of a tongue depressor. If M.R. made love with him, he wouldn’t have known how not-there she was in his arms; he hadn’t the perspicacity to sense the woman’s detachment from him, as a physical being. It was Kroll’s own sensations Kroll monitored—the other, the woman, scarcely existed for him.

  Often M.R. imagined that Kroll would simply cease to call her—abruptly, one day, whatever he’d felt for her, whatever fantasy-net he’d cast over her, in thrall to stately Jane, Countess of Harrington in a fond memory of his youth in England—and she would never hear from him again. That seemed to her utterly plausible, even probable, for Kroll spoke casually—disparagingly—of old, ex-friends, colleagues and “aging protégés” he’d outgrown. As soon as Kroll lost interest in a person, that person ceased to exist for him. Surely, M.R. was forewarned?

  And on those warmer companionable evenings when she did feel attracted to Oliver Kroll, her feelings for her (secret) lover intervened, as a strong radio frequency will drown out a weaker. Am I going to be married? Is that possible?—M.R. smiled at the astonishing thought.

  An elderly woman who’d died when M.R. had been a schoolgirl, in Carthage. And her body not found for several weeks. The horror of such loneliness—aloneness. At the time no one had wished to speak of the woman or give her a name except M.R.’s mother Agatha who’d been appalled, guilt-stricken though the woman had lived several blocks away, and neither of the Neukirchens had known her.

  Repeatedly Agatha had said to M.R. What a terrible thing! Terrible—just terrible. . . . We could have helped that poor woman. We should have known.

  It was distressing to M.R.—“Meredith”—that her mother who was normally so calm should speak in this way; her mother Agatha who took care not to say upsetting things, especially to children. Her mother who hadn’t seemed to believe, in the way of Quaker idealism, in the reality of evil.

 
If we could make amends! Oh how—how can we make amends. . . .

  With other members of the Quaker congregation, Agatha and Meredith began visiting elderly, isolated individuals in the area. They’d brought food, blankets and bedding, clothing. They’d brought household tools, to make repairs. Where serious repairs were needed, Konrad had come with them. Until now, M.R. had forgotten these well-intentioned but awkward visits that had continued at irregular intervals through her senior year of high school. She’d felt enormous sympathy for the elderly women—for those visited happened to be exclusively women—but the visits had been ordeals to her, exhausting. Her face had ached with smiling. Her nostrils had pinched at rancid odors. Where Agatha and the other Quakers had seemed to draw a sort of radiant strength from the visits, M.R. had found them upsetting. Never had the horror of loneliness—aloneness—been so real to her: stark as a mirror reflecting her own face.

  I can love him, then. I will!

  That final time, Kroll came to dinner at M.R.’s house.

  It was early winter. They were seeing each other several times a week. M.R. had learned to navigate Kroll’s moods like a skier on a tricky slope. There had been intimacies between them—wordless, just slightly clumsy—like a wayward vehicle out of control on a steep slope, and no one at the wheel.

  M.R. supposed that, like herself, Kroll was starved for affection—for an affirmation of his existence.

  And there was the issue of the man’s maleness—like a spinning saw, you dared not touch, yet were drawn to touch, fascinated.

  That evening M.R. awaited Kroll’s arrival apprehensively. She’d carefully prepared a meal, she’d bought wine of the sort Kroll seemed to favor, and hard crusty French bread; she’d watered the hydrangea plant with the pale-blue crinkly petals which was, like its predecessor, beginning to fade despite her best efforts. Yet she wasn’t prepared for a stab of emotion when Kroll stepped into the house and greeted her so warmly, avidly—taking hold of her shoulders and kissing her mouth, prodding her teeth with his tongue in a manner both playful and passionate. “Hello hello hello! Darling!”—Kroll was in an exuberant mood.