Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The salesman said, in a tone of genial caution: “Now you understand, Mr. and Mrs. Krim, that the RepliLuxe you’ve purchased is not identical with the original individual.”

  “Of course!” The Krims laughed, to show that they were not such fools.

  “Yet some purchasers,” the salesman continued, “though it’s been explained to them thoroughly, persist in expecting the actual individual, and demand their money back when they discover otherwise.”

  The Krims laughed: “Not us. We are not such fools.”

  “What the RepliLuxe is, technically speaking, is a brilliantly rendered mannikin empowered by a computer program that is the distillation of the original individual, as if his or her essence, or ‘soul’—if you believe in such concepts—had been sucked out of the original being, and reinstalled, in an entirely new environment, by the genius of RepliLuxe. You’ve read, I think, of our exciting new breakthroughs in the area of extending the original life span, for instance, in the case of an individual who died young, like Mozart: providing MozartRepliLuxe with a much longer life and so allowing for more, much more productive work. What you have in EDickinsonRepliLuxe is a simulation of the historical ‘Emily Dickinson’ that isn’t quite so complex of course as the original. Each RepliLuxe varies, sometimes considerably, and can’t be predicted. But you must not expect from your RepliLuxe anything like a ‘real’ human being, as of course you know, since you’ve read our contract, that RepliLuxes are not equipped with gastrointestinal systems, or sex organs, or blood, or a ‘warm, beating heart’—don’t be disappointed! They are programmed to respond to their new environment more or less as the original would have done, albeit in a simplified manner. Obviously, some RepliLuxes are more adaptable than others, and some households are more suitable for RepliLuxes than others. The United States government forbids RepliLuxes outside the privacy of the household, as you know, for otherwise we might have public spectacles like a boxing match between ‘Jack Dempsey’ and ‘Jack Dempsey,’ or a baseball game in which both teams were made up of ‘Babe Ruth.’ Male athletes are our best-selling items though they are really not suited for private households since owners are forbidden to exercise them outdoors. Like Dalmations, whippets, greyhounds, they need to be exercised daily, and this has created some problems, I’m afraid. But your poet is ideal, it seems ‘Emily Dickinson’ never did go outdoors! Congratulations on a wise choice.”

  In their dazzled state the Krims hadn’t followed all that the salesman had said but now they shook his hand, and thanked him, and prepared to leave. So much had been decided, in so short a span of time! In the car returning to Golders Green, the wife began suddenly to cry, in sheer happiness. The husband, gripping the steering wheel tight in both his hands, stared straight ahead wishing not to think What have we done? What have we done?

  To prepare for their distinguished houseguest, the wife bought the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, several biographies, and an immense book of photographs, The Dickinsons of Amherst, but most days she was too restless to sit still and read, especially she had trouble reading Dickinson’s knotty, riddlesome little poems, and so busied herself preparing a “suitable, climate-controlled environment” as stipulated in a RepliLuxe booklet, to prevent “mechanical deterioration” of the RepliLuxe in excesses of humidity/aridity. She acquired from antique stores a number of period furnishings that resembled those in the poet’s bedroom: a mahogany “sleigh” bed of the 1850s so narrow it might have belonged to a child, with an ivory crocheted quilt and a single matching goose-feather pillow; a bureau of four drawers, in rich, burnished-looking maple; a small writing table, and other matching tables upon which the wife placed candles. The wife found two straight-back chairs with woven seats, filmy white organdy curtains to hang at the room’s three windows, a delicately patterned beige wallpaper, and a milk glass kerosene lamp circa 1860. She could not hope to duplicate the framed portraits on Emily’s walls, which must have been of ancestors, but she located portraits of anonymous nineteenth-century gentlemen, similarly dour, brooding and ghostly, and amid these she hung a portrait of her grandmother Loomis who’d died many years ago. When at last the room was completed, and the husband had come to marvel at it, the wife seated herself at the impracticably small writing table, at a window flooded with spring sunshine, and picked up a pen and waited for inspiration, poised to write.

  “‘I taste a liquor…’”

  But nothing more came, just now.

  The first shock: Emily was so small.

  When EDickinsonRepliLuxe was delivered to the Krim household, uncrated, and positioned upright, the purportedly thirty-year-old woman more resembled a malnourished girl of ten or eleven, who barely came to the wife’s shoulder. Though the Krims had seen that even Babe Ruth had been reduced in size, somehow they weren’t prepared for their poet-companion to look so stunted. It seemed that the RepliLuxe had been modeled after the single extant daguerreotype of the poet, taken when she was a very young sixteen. Her eyes were large, dark, and oddly lashless, her skin was ivory-pale, smooth as paper. Her eyebrows were wider than you’d expect, heavier and more defined, like a boy’s. Her mouth, too, was unexpectedly wide and fleshy, with a suggestion of disdain, in that narrow face. Her dark hair had been severely parted in the center of her head and pulled back flatly and tightly into a knot of a bun, covering most of her unusually small ears like a cap. In a dark cotton dress, long-sleeved, ankle-length, with an impossibly tiny waist, EDickinsonRepliLuxe more resembled the wizened corpse of a child-nun than a woman-poet of thirty. The wife stared in horror at the lifeless eyes, the rigid mouth. The husband, very nervous, was having difficulties, as he often did with such devices, with the remote control wand. There were numerous menu options, he’d begun striking numerals impatiently. “‘Sleep mode.’ How the hell does it ‘activate’…” By chance the husband must have struck the right combination since there came a click and a humming sound from EDickinsonRepliLuxe and after a moment the lashless eyes came alive, glassy yet alert, darting about the room before fixing on the Krims standing perhaps five feet away from the figure. Now the lungs inside the narrow chest began to breathe, or to eerily simulate the process of breathing. The fleshy lips moved, in a quick grimace of a smile, but no sound was uttered. The husband mumbled an awkward greeting: “‘Miss Dickinson’—‘Emily’—hello! We are…” As EDickinsonRepliLuxe blinked and stared, motionless except for a slight adjustment of her head, and a wringing gesture of her small hands, the husband introduced himself and Mrs. Krim. “You have come a long distance to our home in Golders Green, New York, Emily! I wouldn’t wonder, you’re feeling…” The husband spoke haltingly yet with as much heartiness as he could summon, as often in his professional life he was required to be welcoming to younger associates, hoping to put them at their ease though clearly he wasn’t at ease himself. Shyly the wife said, “I—I hope you will call me Madelyn, or—Maddie!—dear Emily. I am your friend here in Golders Green, and a lover of…” The wife blushed fiercely, for she could not bring herself to say poetry, dreading to be mistaken for a silly, pretentious suburban matron; yet to utter the word lover as her voice trailed off was equally embarrassing and awkward. EDickinsonRepliLuxe lowered her eyes, which were still rapidly blinking. She remained stiffly motionless as if awaiting instructions. The husband felt a wave of dismay, disappointment. Why had he given in to his wife’s whim, in the RepliLuxe outlet! He had not wanted to bring a neurotic female poet into his household, he had wanted a vigorous male artist. The wife was smiling hopefully at EDickinsonRepliLuxe seeing with a pang of emotion that the child-sized Emily was wearing tiny buckled shoes, and was twisting a white lace hankie in both hands. And around her slender neck she wore a velvet ribbon, crossed at her throat and affixed with a cameo pin. Of course, the poet was stricken with shyness: Emily could have no idea where she was, who the Krims were, if she was awake or dreaming or if there was any distinction between wakefulness and dreaming in her transmogrified state. In the packing crate with her had come
a small trunk presumably containing her clothing, a traveling bag and what appeared to be a sewing box covered in red satin. The wife said, “I would help you unpack, dear Emily, but I think you would prefer to be alone just now, wouldn’t you? Harold and I will be downstairs whenever you wish to…” The wife spoke haltingly yet with warmth. The wife was both frightened of EDickinsonRepliLuxe and powerfully attracted to her, as to a lost sister. In that instant Emily’s eyes lifted to her, a sudden piercing look as of (sisterly?) recognition. The small hands continued to twist the lace hankie, clearly the poet wished her host and hostess gone.

  As the Krims turned to leave they heard for the first time the small whispery voice of EDickinsonRepliLuxe, only just audible: “Yes thank you mistress and master I am very grateful.”

  On the stairs, the wife clutched at the husband’s arm so tightly he felt the impress of her fingernails. Breathlessly she murmured, “Only think, Emily Dickinson has come to live with us. It can’t be possible and yet, it’s her.” The husband, who was feeling shaky and unsettled, said irritably, “Don’t be silly, Madelyn. That isn’t ‘her,’ it’s a mannikin. ‘She’ is a very clever computer program. She is ‘it’ and we are her owners, not her companions.” The wife pushed at the husband in sudden revulsion. “No! You’re wrong. You saw her eyes.”

  That evening the Krims waited for their house guest to join them, at first at the dinner table, and then in the living room where the wife kindled a fire in the fireplace and the husband, who usually watched television at this hour, sat reading, or trying to read, a new book with the title The Miraculous Universe; but hours passed, and to their disappointment EDickinsonRepliLuxe did not appear. From time to time they heard faint footsteps overhead, a ghostly creaking of the floor. And that was all.

  For several tense days following her arrival the poet remained sequestered in her room though the wife urged her to “move about” the house as she wished: “This is your home now, Emily. We are your…” hesitating to say family, for its hint of intimacy, familiarity. By the end of the week Emily began to be sighted outside her room, a mysterious and elusive figure fleeting as a woodland creature no sooner glimpsed than it has vanished. “Did you see her? Was that her?” the wife whispered to the husband as a wraith-like figure glided past a doorway, or turned a corner, noiselessly, and was gone. Cruelly the husband said, “Not ‘her,’ ‘it.’” The husband fled to his corporate office as frequently as he could.

  Emily continued to wear the long dark dress like a nun’s habit but over this dress, tightly tied at the waist, a white apron. Though she seemed not to hear the wife’s entreaties—“Emily, dear? Wait—” yet the wife began to discover the kitchen tidied in her absence, and floors swept and polished, and sprigs of yellow-budding forsythia in vases!—evidence that Emily was not such a recluse, but capable of stepping outside the Krims’ house, to cut forsythia branches in the backyard unobserved. For Emily had always to be busy: housecleaning, baking bread (her specialty, brown bread with molasses) and pies (rhubarb, mincemeat, pumpkin), helping the wife (who’d once had lessons at a serious cooking school in New York City but had forgotten most of what she’d learned) prepare meals. The wife loved to hear her poet-companion humming to herself, the more brightly and briskly when she was seated by a sunny window embroidering, or knitting, or doing needlepoint; often Emily would pause to scribble down a few words on a scrap of paper, quickly thrust into an apron pocket. If the wife were nearby, and had seen, certainly she pretended not to have seen. Thinking She has begun writing poetry! In our house!

  Eagerly the wife waited for the poet to share her poetry with her. For the two were soul mates after all.

  Though Emily could not partake of tea, or of any food or drink, yet Emily took a childlike pleasure in the ritual of afternoon tea, insisting upon serving the wife fresh-brewed English tea (“tea bags” shocked and offended the poet, she refused even to touch them) with crustless cucumber sandwiches and slender vanilla cookies she called ladyfingers. The wife had not the heart to tell Emily that she rarely drank tea, for the ritual seemed to mean so much to Emily, clearly it was a connection with the poet’s old, lost life at the Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. “Emily, come sit with me! Please.” The wife’s voice must have been jarring in its raw appeal, or over-loud, for Emily winced, but set her little book aside, and came to join the wife at tea in a sunny glass-walled room at the rear of the house, as a child might, who couldn’t yet drink anything so strong as tea but would content herself with closing her fingers around a cup filled with hot tea as if to absorb warmth from it. (Such delicate fingers, the poet had! The wife wondered if EDickinsonRepliLuxe could “feel” heat.) “What have you been reading, Emily?” the wife asked, and Emily replied, in her whispery voice, not quite meeting the wife’s eye, what sounded like “…some verse, Mrs. Krim. Only!” The wife took note of the petite woman who sat quivering beside her, yet with perfect posture; the wife took note of the glisten of her fine dark hair (that seemed to be genuine, “human hair” and not synthetic) and of her startling smile, the suddenly bared childlike teeth that were uneven and discolored as aged piano keys. There was something almost carnal in the smile, deeply disturbing to the wife for whom such smiles had been rare in her lifetime and had long since ceased entirely. The wife said, faltering, “It seems that we know each other, dear Emily? Don’t we? My grandmother Loomis…” But the wife had no idea what she was saying. A shiver seemed to pass across the poet’s small pale face. Her eyes lifted to the wife’s eyes, fleeting as the slash of a razor, playful, or mocking; and soon then the poet rose to carry away the dirtied tea things to the kitchen, where she washed the cups with care, and dried them; and tidied everything up, so the kitchen was spotless. The wife protested clumsily, “But you are a poet, Emily!—it seems wrong, for you to work as—” and the poet said, in her whispery voice, “Mistress, to be a ‘poet’ merely—is not to ‘be.’”

  So seeming frail, the petite Emily yet exuded a will that was steely, obdurate. The wife went away shaken, and moved.

  Days passed, the wife rarely left the house. For the wife was enthralled, enchanted. Yet Emily only hovered close by, like a butterfly that never alights on any surface; Emily eluded the intimacy even of sisters, and never spoke of, nor even hinted at, her poetry. The wife saw with satisfaction that the husband had virtually no rapport at all with the poet, trying in his stiff, formal way to address her as if indeed he were speaking to a motorized mannikin and not to a living person: “Why, Emily! Hel-lo. How are you this evening, Emily?” The husband smiled a forced ghastly smile, licking his lips uneasily, which might have been repellent to the poet, the wife perceived, for Emily gave only her quick grimace of a smile in return, and made a curtsy gesture that might have been ( just perceptibly!) mocking, for the wife’s benefit, and lowered her head in a gesture of feminine meekness that could not be sincere, and murmured what sounded like “Very well master thank you” slipping away noiselessly before the husband could think of another banal query. The wife laughed, how completely Emily Dickinson belonged to her.

  Yet, though the wife frequently came upon Emily reading volumes of what she called verse, by such poets as Longfellow, Browning, Keats, and often saw Emily hastily scribbling words on scraps of paper to hide in her apron pockets, and though the wife hinted strongly—wistfully—of her love for poetry, Emily did not share her poetry with the wife, any more than she shared her poetry with the husband. The wife observed Emily in the kitchen, or seated at one or another of her favored, sunny windows, and felt a pang of loneliness and loss. She’d learned that if she very quietly approached the poet from behind she could come very close to her, for the RepliLuxe had been deliberately engineered to allow owners to approach figures in this way, being unable to detect anyone or anything that wasn’t present in their field of vision, or didn’t make a distinctive sound to alert the figure’s auditory mechanism. This was thrilling! At such times the wife trembled with the temerity of what she was doing, and what she was risking sho
uld the poet turn to discover her. Yet she felt that she was being drawn to the poet irresistibly by Emily’s quiet, intense humming that resembled a cat’s purr: utter contentment, intimate and seductive. The wife was so drawn to Emily in this way, as if under a spell she did something extraordinary one afternoon in mid-May:

  She’d brought along the RepliLuxe remote control. She had never so much as touched this device before. And now, standing behind her poet-companion, she clicked off activate and entered sleep mode.

  Sleep mode! For the first time since the husband had activated EDickinsonRepliLuxe weeks before, the animated figure froze in place with a click! like a television set being switched off.

  The poet had been in the kitchen, paring potatoes. Such simple manual tasks gave her much evident pleasure. Imagining herself unobserved she’d several times paused, wiping her small deft fingers on her apron, and with a pencil stub scribbled something on a scrap of paper, and thrust the scrap into her apron pocket. But after the click! the wife drew cautiously near the frozen figure of the poet, murmuring, “Oh Emily, dear! Do you hear me?”—though the figure’s dark lashless eyes had gone glassy and dead and it seemed clear that the wife’s poet-companion had no more awareness of her presence at this time than a mannikin would have had.

  (Yet the wife couldn’t truly believe that Emily wasn’t merely sleeping. “Of course, Emily is ‘real.’ I know this.”)

  It took some time for the wife to summon her courage, to touch Emily: the stiff material of her sleeve, the tight-smoothed hair that smelled just faintly metallic. The papery-smooth cheek. The parted lips as lifelike, seen at such close range, as the wife’s own. How close the wife came to stooping suddenly, impulsively, and kissing her friend on those lips! (It was a very long time since the wife had kissed anyone on the lips, or had been kissed by anyone on her lips. For she and her husband had never been very passionate individuals even when newly wed.) Instead, the wife dared to slip her hand into Emily’s apron pocket. As she drew out several scraps of paper, she felt as if she might faint.