Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  By this time the long-legged silver-blond girl and her companions had crossed the street and were gone. Not a glance had they given to the short-of-breath middle-aged couple in the corroded Nissan whose lives were visibly unraveling like a cheap sweater given a sudden yank.

  She would forgive. Of course.

  She would not forgive. Not this time.

  Over the course of years, now nearly seventeen at the college in the Hampshire hills, and several years preceding at the state university at Durham, there’d been a number of girl-protégées who had entered the husband’s life. Not always but usually dancers. Not always but usually blond with fetus-perfect faces, unlined and unlived-in.

  Most of these girls had been nameless, faceless. The wife had known, but had not-known. In his sleep beside her the husband might grind his teeth and mutter an obscure name—Em’ly! (Emily?) Tiff ‘ny! (Tiffany?)—that vanished even as the wife tried to decipher it.

  In fact, for all of those years the wife had been enormously busy with her own life and a good part of this life the care and nourishment of the lives of others: husband, young children. Her career as a food writer with an anthropologist’s cool eye and a food lover’s avidity of appetite was challenging and occasionally thrilling. I know who I am. That will not change. For a brief, hectic season her husband might be distracted by a girl—or two, or three—but after graduation the girls disappeared. Or so the wife believed.

  Other faculty wives assured her, this was so. Usually, this was so.

  Well. Possibly the husband kept in touch with some of the protégées, the most promising, the most attractive. The protégées who’d most seemed to admire him. And to need him.

  Possibly the husband exchanged emails with the girls. In the city, and away overnight, he might arrange to see them. That was possible. If a girl was performing in a dance program, or in a play, naturally she would provide a comp ticket for her favorite professor Victor Stockman, and naturally, the favorite professor would accept; because she was likely to be a girl from a rich family, whose parents were underwriting her New York lifestyle, it was not unlikely that the comp ticket entailed dinners at swanky restaurants as well, following the performances. And what followed then, the wife could not know. The wife did not wish to know, enormously busy with her life in the Hampshire hills, unable to accompany the husband to New York City for such festive occasions, and uninvited. Certainly the wife had not been jealous.

  Telling herself how she had her own life. After all.

  Victor believed in monogamy, he’d often said, in jest. One wife at a time.

  Truly it was a jest. Those who heard laughed, obligingly.

  The Stockmans were devoted to each other, it was often said. Not by the Stockmans perhaps but by others, observing.

  There was something fairy-tale about the couple. Each looked subtly deformed, yet you could not put your finger on where the deformity lurked: in the body, in the face, in the gaze, in the soul. Each was “witty”—yet clumsily shy. Each was gifted—the husband a musician-composer, very avant-garde; the wife a writer—a “food critic”—who published in New York City–centric publications and whose first book had had a small, cheering success, too long ago to matter. Neither had been married before this marriage that seemed to have begun in a fairy-tale childhood, as if dwarf-children had married.

  That the Stockmans had children—altogether normal-seeming, normal-sized and normal-mannered children, who were mortified by their odd-looking, oddly-behaving parents—was an astonishment of which the parents could know little; though sometimes Elinor saw the wincing look in the oldest daughter’s face, when slovenly Elinor appeared in public in some proximity to the slender, sardonic Isabel—Oh Mom! Isabel murmured with a roll of her beautiful brown eyes.

  If the Stockman children knew of their mother’s unhappiness, they could not have known its source. In the Stockman household, the adults never quarreled; the most antagonism their gentlemanly father revealed was a furious humming of the more bellicose composers (Beethoven, Mahler, Shostakovich) through clenched teeth while their mother, hiding away in her kitchen-space like a fat dimpled spider in its web, seethed in silence, and sampled spoonfuls and handfuls of the meals she was preparing.

  Old friends of the couple knew something of the frayed nerves between them though Elinor had too much pride to complain of anything so banal as a husband romantically obsessed with blond teenagers. Indeed, Elinor made it a point to amuse house guests and visitors, complaining wittily of the New England town “perfect on the surface” as a Norman Rockwell Christmas card—“We do ‘quaint’ here very nicely,” Elinor told them. “We have plenty of practice.”

  Yet, Elinor took a perverse sort of pride in living there. In having persevered, in this remote New England place to which her (then-young, ambitious) composer-husband had brought her, with a promise that it would be for only a few years—until Victor Stockman was established as a brilliant young composer, with invitations to join the music faculty at Juilliard, Curtis, Princeton.

  “Well. We are ‘still waiting.’ We do that well, too.”

  Driving by the music school, a squat gothic building with leaded windows, Elinor gave the impression of being undecided about whether to drop in to say hello to Victor—“He’d love to see us of course, but probably it isn’t a good idea without calling first. He’s always so busy—teaching, in rehearsals, auditions …” Her bright voice faded, trailed away.

  Teaching. Its verbal proximity to leching. Shame!

  Sometimes, to the astonishment of a friend to whom Elinor had hinted no unhappiness or unease, scarcely even a characteristic crankiness, she began crying with no explanation. God damn.

  Quintessential New England, Elinor told her friends. The residents did not see themselves as “quaint” but rather as “realists”—their suspicion was bred in the bone, like certain types of cancer.

  “They believe in expecting the worst. That way they’re rarely surprised and never disappointed.”

  Elinor quite enjoyed playing the cynic. It gave her a small mean pleasure to hear her friends laugh appreciatively, sometimes warily, at her witty remarks. Oh, they went away marveling, Elinor Stockman is so funny.

  So brave, and so funny. But what a shame, she must have gained forty pounds in the past year alone … Her graying hair was coarsely and crookedly braided and her face looked as if it had been scrubbed, sallow and plain, defiant. Her favorite article of clothing was a sacklike denim jumper worn over a black sweater with a frayed neck; in cold weather she wore a red quilted down coat that resembled a small, strangely ambulatory tent, from which the children hid their eyes.

  One of the visitors would recall how quickly Elinor began to pant walking uphill across the village green on a mild spring day. How oddly Elinor stared at several college girls who were talking and laughing oblivious of Elinor and her friend a few yards away.

  When the friend asked Elinor if she knew the girls Elinor said irritably of course not, she’d never seen them before.

  “There are hundreds of them at the college. You can’t tell them apart. Spoiled little rich girls with long straight hair and perfect orthodontia.”

  Elinor spoke with such venom, the friend thought at first that she must be joking. But there was Elinor trembling with something like indignation, turning away from the sight of the girls.

  Quickly, the friend changed the subject. Though thinking how unlikely it was that there could be hundreds of girls quite like these with their long straight corn-silk hair, so striking and so self-confident, so beautiful, even in all of New England.

  It had become a not-funny joke. Where was Daddy, Daddy was away.

  Where was Daddy, Daddy was not having dinner with them that night.

  Unfair, Elinor thought. Why do they blame me.

  A flame of pure senseless hatred for the children swept over her, their hurt faces, accusing eyes as they stood in the kitchen glaring at her and preparing to sneer at whatever she’d prepared for them to eat.r />
  Then, in a contrary motion, a wave of love for them deeper and more profound than any love she could have discovered for herself came over her, leaving her faint. They are of my body, we are bonded forever. I am responsible for their happiness, and I am failing them.

  For it was her fault, essentially. The woman’s fault, failing to satisfy the man. Failing to be enough for the man. No matter that the man is not nearly enough for her.

  In the children’s eyes the mother was humbled, humiliated. In the eyes of the oldest girl Isabel, especially.

  In the girl’s face a look of anguish, mortification that hardened into the jeering mask—“Oh, Mom. For God’s sake.”

  It was Elinor’s very existence that exasperated the girl, and turned her heart against her mother.

  Since the previous November the husband had often been away. What was worse, he was rarely far away—just in his damned studio at the college where he frequently worked so late (teaching, meeting with senior advisees, conducting rehearsals), it was easier (as he reasoned) to remain there all night sleeping on a couch than to “hurry home” to sleep for just a few hours.

  But what about dinner. Don’t you want to eat with your family.

  Why don’t you want to eat with us? YOU ARE US.

  She wanted to scream at him, when he did return home. But that would only drive him away again so she hid in the shower filling the drafty bathroom with steam, or in an attic room she’d fashioned into a study. Her first book had been titled Comfort Food: Favorite Recipes of Childhood. Her second book, at which she’d been working for years, would be titled After Comfort Food: Recipes for Adult Survival.

  In a rash and uncharacteristically vainglorious gesture the wife had accepted an advance for this second book, that promised (her editor believed) to be a “runaway” bestseller. The advance had long been frittered away, lost.

  The husband had always been Elinor’s first reader. He’d been a most enthusiastic reader before Elinor had begun to publish in such places as The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine; he seemed less certain of her talent now, more critical and grudging with his praise. Not that it mattered greatly for Elinor wasn’t writing much any longer, and had only a scattering of notes and outlines for the second book.

  In case of death of author: DNR (do not resuscitate) manuscript.

  This notice she’d tacked onto a wall beside her desk. Not sure if it was intended to be funny.

  “Elinor, you have changed my life. You have made my life possible.”

  In an earlier phase of his life Victor Stockman had been one to make such grandiose pronouncements. Shy, yet stubborn; clearly very intelligent, yet naive and gullible; sexually inexperienced, as Elinor was also, and therefore easily led, seduced. A fattish young man with owl-eyed glasses, a weak chin and a faint stammer, in his early twenties when they’d met and Elinor had perceived in him a musical genius of an arcane type, unworldly, unexpectedly kind (at times) and (at times) childishly short-tempered. Above all, she had perceived in Victor Stockman an inexpert with women, which was to her advantage as she’d been certainly inexpert with men.

  Victor was a passionate theorist and composer of “new music”—a protégée of Milton Babbitt (the experimental composer who’d once given an interview titled “Who Cares If You Listen?”) and one of a very small, elite circle of contemporary composers: electronic, minimalist, aleatory, “atmospheric.” Of Victor’s myriad compositions only one had been singled out for acclaim, a chamber quartet influenced by Babbitt, John Cage and Philip Glass, which, by one of those flukes that occurs occasionally in academic music, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1987. (Later, Victor would learn that Milton Babbitt had been one of the jurors on the Pulitzer committee. Mortified, he had wanted to turn back the award but had been dissuaded by Elinor, among others.)

  The CD of this prize-winning work would sell less than a thousand copies; Elinor’s Comfort Food sold nearly a hundred thousand copies in hardcover and paperback. Yet, within the Stockman household, as within the college community, it was Victor Stockman who was the renowned, primary spouse, and not Elinor; Victor was the designated genius of the family while Elinor was the faculty wife-and-mother with an “interesting” career on the side.

  Since the Pulitzer, now twenty years ago, Victor had completed few ambitious compositions. It had seemed easier, certainly more emotionally rewarding, to concentrate on teaching. He advised on senior honors theses. He codirected the dance program. He’d established a center for young composers and coauthored music with some of them—“Aleatory Harmonies for Farm Implements” was a notable title. His lecture course Experimental Music of the 20th Century from Stravinsky to Glass became so popular it had to be moved into an amphitheater with three hundred seats; his lectures, meticulously prepared, rapid-fire in delivery and bristling like his stiff, graying whiskers, were considered “brilliant”—“cool”—“genius.” The less his admirers understood, the more evident the “genius.”

  Elinor did not think it much evidence of genius that Victor was reluctant to ask for a raise in his salary at the college. No one at the famously liberal college was paid what you’d call “well” but Victor was reputed to be a star, one of just a few. His salary raises were minuscule, insulting.

  He exasperated the wife by declaring that he’d gladly have worked for half what they paid him, he so loved teaching and working with young people.

  Working with young girls, he’d meant. Elinor knew.

  “‘An administrator is one who knows how to take advantage of the foolish idealism of another. An idealist is one who knows only how to be taken advantage of.’”

  Asked who’d made this sardonic remark Elinor retorted, “H. L. Mencken.” But of course, the remark was purely Elinor.

  Yet Victor was a man of pride, including sexual pride. That was the irony. No man however middle-aged and fattish, short of breath, suffering from hypertension and erratic heartbeat, discouraged about his career as by life in general, with badly deteriorating teeth, is totally lacking in sexual pride.

  The long-legged girl was not a figment of the wife’s imagination but indeed a dancer, a senior advisee of Victor Stockman’s. One of a lengthy series of “talented” young people with whom he’d worked—the wife told herself—not anyone singular, special.

  Yet, the girl’s work was indeed unusual. Her thesis was an adaptation of Herman Melville’s dark allegory “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” as an eerie and starkly sexual ballet set to little-known music of Bartok, which her advisor Professor Stockman had arranged. Not only did the long-legged girl dance the lead role but she’d painted the set herself in blood-red streaks. The costumes (which she’d made herself) were blood-red, in tatters. Male dancers wore black leotards. There was much rushing from one side of the stage to the other. Undeniably, the long-legged girl was outstanding in the lead as a figure trying to free herself from the clutching of others, who seek to drown her or (it wasn’t always clear) mate with her. Beside Elinor, in the first row, Victor stared and stared and stroked his whiskery jaws in a way that seemed to Elinor far too intimate, verging upon the obscene.

  At the curtain the girl bowed in a graceful pose of humility from the waist and her long straight silver-blond hair fell about her face shimmering like a falls. And there was Victor Stockman, summoned by the triumphantly smiling girl to stand beside her, that the amphitheater might applaud them both: student dancer, professor/advisor. The two of them—(could it be?)—grasping each other’s hand.

  Afterward Elinor accused the husband of holding the girl’s hand in front of a gaping audience—“How could you, Victor! I hate you.“

  “That’s altogether ridiculous, Elinor! Nothing of the sort happened. Stacy and I did not touch.”

  (So the girl’s name was Stacy. Elinor had not been able to avoid this demeaning knowledge.)

  She’d seen what she had seen. Looks of blatant adoration passing between the long-legged dancer in the tattered red leotard
and the husband in an ill-fitting suit.

  Or indeed, was Elinor imagining it? This past year the children had begun to speak of her in the third person as if she weren’t present. Mom is losing it. Mom is too weird. Mom is having a meltdown. Mom is pitiful. You have to feel sorry for her—poor Mom.

  Following this public humiliation, private humiliations.

  Heavily the husband sighed. Dared to roll his eyes.

  A new habit of Victor’s, stroking his whiskery jaws. Hard little drum of a belly so low, he had to maneuver his belt beneath it. Which made walking just slightly difficult.

  Swaggering confidence and yet (if you observed closely) a nervous tic in every pocket waiting to be tugged out like a magician’s handkerchief. The wife tried not to notice how eagerly the husband checked his emails and text messages. Like a teenager, how he could not bear to be separated from his cell phone. (Elinor had misplaced two cell phones out of indifference. But then she was Elinor, an old person’s name.)

  Weeks had passed since “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Weeks of subterranean resistance on the part of the husband and a stiff wounded silence on the part of the wife. As if she were to blame for his behavior.

  Please look at me. Please acknowledge what you have done.

  Though it wasn’t clear, it had never been clear, exactly what Victor had done: if his erotic obsessions were what you’d call consummated, or just wishful fantasizing.

  In calmer moods the wife reasoned that an actual love affair with one of his students was (probably) not likely for prissy fussy clumsy short-of-breath Victor Stockman with his scratchy whiskers and (occasional) flatulence; even if Victor could overcome his physical clumsiness and timidity, how likely was it that a beautiful young girl could succumb to his charms? Why would a beautiful young girl make herself sexually available to him?

  Yet: such affairs happened. Dismayingly often, even routinely. Marriages dissolved, wives were left behind—dumped was the ungracious term. Elinor dreaded the possibility, could not bear to consider the probability: dumped.