Joyce Carol Oates - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Because It Is Bitter

  Nancy is the more physically developed of the two: breasts, hips, thighs, dimpled smile. Iris is leggy, long-armed, narrow boyish hips and small hard breasts. Glancing uneasily down at herself she sees flesh white and vulnerable as something pried out of a shell.

  When Persia accused Duke of being mean-hearted, he'd flared up angry and incredulous. Icy eyes in a hot, slapped-looking face.

  Now Iris is thinking it's surely a sign of mean-heartedness...

  you can't know.

  And if you can't know how can you change?

  She watches Jinx Fairchild scale a sharp-angled girder to get to the top of the bridge, as easily as if he's been doing it all his life.

  Her toes twitch and cringe in sympathy. As if somehow it's Iris Courtney up there too.... Nancy complains of Sugar Baby, he's got a mouth on him, that guy, he'd better watch that mouth of his. 'A colored boy could get into trouble saying the wrong thing to a white girl. I do mean trouble."

  On the bridge's topmost girder Jinx Fairchild stands cautiously, straightening his long lanky legs. Iris has seen him play basketball in the neighborhood park and at school: those long legs, long arms, playful deadpan smirk. Jinx is darker-skinned than Sugar Baby, as if the sun has baked him deep and hard. His woolly hair is cropped short, his rib cage shows fleet and rippling inside his skin. Clowning pop eyes rimmed in white in a dark dark face.

  Iris knows that Jinx's true name is Verlyn: Verlyn Rayburn Fairchild.

  She has seen it in official lists at school; Jinx has just graduated from ninth grade, two years ahead of her. And she knows where he lives, in a small wood-frame house with a porch and a side garden in the "good" section of black Lowertown, East Avenue as it shifts from white Lowertown, a quarter mile, maybe less, from her own building.

  .

  . a short distance across weedy back lots and the old canning factory property and an open drainage ditch. Beyond the Fairchilds' short block East Avenue is unpaved and the neighborhood changes abruptly: tarpaper shanties, yards heaped with trash, small children spilling over into the road, wandering dogs, that smell of garbagey overripeness and things burning, a place where human distinctions are overrun. But the Fairchilds don't live there.

  Sugar Baby's true name is Woodrow: Woodrow William Fairchild, Jr. Last season he was a star basketball player at the high school, the best colored player on the team. But he isn't returning in the fall, says he's got better things to do. Nobody ever needed a diploma for carpentry or bricklaying or construction or hotel or railroad work: nigger-boy vocational-school shit like that. Says Sugar Baby in that voice you can't tell is it quavering with hurt or anger or jivey good humor, he's got better things to do.

  Anyway, Sugar Baby says, Jinx is the real thing. You watch him coming along.

  Iris watches: Jinx Fairchild atop the Peach Tree Bridge, executing a backward dive even as his friends try to distract him: a single astonishing fluid motion, arms and legs outstretched, unhesitating, flawless, slicing the dark water fast and clean and sharp asaknife.

  august 20, 19

  55: Leslie Courtney s fortieth birthday.

  Which is not going to be celebrated, as Leslie Courtney's birthdays have frequently been celebrated, in the Holland Street flat since things there, as Persia Courtney says, are still unsettled.

  "Unsettled."

  This word, neutral, fastidiously chosen, evokes in Leslie Courtney's mind's eye a vision of a small boat being tossed in stormy water.

  Leslie telephones his sister-in-law Persia two or three times a week, to see how things are. If Duke is home, he speaks with Duke.

  Duke is not often home.

  It's one of those summer days when the sky is banked with rain clouds like plum-colored bruises. Heat lightning flashing soundless above the river.

  How on such an afternoon, did they both forget the umbrella?

  Persia doesn't think of it until, getting off the bus, a sulfurous-tasting wind rises in her face. She says, "Oh, damn."

  Then, "You know I can't be expected to remember every damn thing."

  She and Iris are carrying Leslie's two wrapped birthday presents, plus the cake, which is probably why they forgot the umbrella.

  Iris has learned that the most innocent remark-though few of Iris's remarks to her mother are in fact innocent can trigger a quarrel. So it's with caution she points out that they can always borrow an umbrella from Uncle Leslie if it's raining when they leave.

  Persia says with her helpless-sounding laugh, the new laugh that means hurt, anger, befuddlement, "It's the principle of the thing. The forgetfulness. Like an old sweater unraveling.

  She's on the street with a cigarette slanting from her lips, wavy hair streaming, mouth very red. Iris recalls, a few years back, Persia nudging her to observe a woman smoking on the street: cheap. No matter how good-looking the woman, Persia warned: cheap.

  Iris says, "Well, I hope the cake turned out.

  Persia says, 'Any idiot can make a cake out of a mix. That's the entire point of mixes.

  COURTNEY'S PHOTOGRAPHY SCAiD-"Portraits of Distinction"-is located at 591 North Main Street. It's a small shop with a single display window squeezed between a shoe store that sells mainly to Negroes, though owned and staffed by whites, and a seafood store that emits a powerful briny odor in all weathers.

  When Iris thinks of her uncle's photography studio she thinks of the doomed lobsters, black, spidery, giant-clawed, groping about in the bubbly water tank in the neighboring front window.

  Staring in the window of Leslie's shop, mother and daughter are silenced for a moment, seeing their likenesses on display..

  amid many other portraits. The glass is flyspecked, many of the older photographs are discolored. What a jumble! It's like a common graveyard: photographs of unknown men, women, and children...

  black faces beside white... landscapes of the city of Hammond.

  .

  . the riverfront... "artistic" studies that yield their designs only after a long minute's scrutiny. It seems that Leslie never takes anything out of his display case, only adds: like the interior of the shop, where the walls are covered with framed prints.

  "There we are," Iris murmurs to Persia, feeling a stab of emotion, sheer emotion, nameless inchoate emotion sharp as tears, "and there.

  And there."

  "Oh, spare me!" Persia says. But she looks.

  For as long as Iris can remember her parents have joked and complained and worried aloud about her uncle Leslie: his lack of "normal" ambition... the "squalor" of his little shop...

  the mystery of how he makes a living. And he's a brilliant man, a true original, Duke insists extravagantly: "My superior in every way.

  For as long too as Iris can remember Persia has been bringing her to sit for double portraits in Leslie's studio-"Persia-and-Iris portraits," Leslie calls them-though the sessions leave Persia increasingly restless. Her vanity has long since been sated.

  It offends Persia too that Leslie does nothing with the finished products, beautiful though they are, except to give prints to the Courtneys and display others in the studio, rudely mixed with the likenesses of strangers.

  "Why doesn't he take the old ones out?" Persia says, annoyed.

  "They're so old."

  Iris wipes roughly at her eyes. "If that's actually me-that baby-I wish I could remember. Momma, I don't remember any of it!"

  Persia says, "I remember."

  Mother and daughter stand staring through grimy glass seeing mother-and-daughter gazing placidly out, each pair of photographed likenesses inhabiting their inviolate time beyond the breath of perishable things.

  Again Persia says, sighing, "I remember."

  On their way into the shop Persia warns Iris, "Don't let on, for God's sake, that we really don't want to be here. You know how Leslie is."

  "What do you mean?" Iris says, surprised, rather hurt. "I want to be here. I don't have anything else I'd rather do."

  Persia says quietly, "Well, I do."

  "My God,
what is this... ? Persia, Iris... you shouldn't have."

  There's a crinkling electric sheen to the fancy red wrapping paper on the presents as, a bit clumsily, Leslie Courtney unwraps them...

  careful not to tear the paper. He's smiling so deeply, his eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses so misted over, it almost seems he might have forgotten that today is his birthday. He'd planned a photography session has everything, including a vase of white roses, in readiness-but a birthday?

  He is agitated... funny man. Thanking them repeatedly.

  Hugging and kissing Persia on the cheek, hugging Iris. Hard.

  There's a handsome cowhide wallet from Persia, a dappled blue silk necktie from Iris: both presents acquired by Persia by way of a friend who manages the "best" men's clothing store in Hammond, a poker buddy of Duke's. And there's the angel food cake, vanilla frosting in tiny crests, like waves, and four pink candles, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY L.C.

  spelled out in tiny red cinnamon candies. In a giddy mood-such moods, lately, Persia and Iris find themselves sharing-they'd placed the candies on together that morning, giggling like children. The absurdity of it! Persia sniffed.

  Frosting a cake." Birthdays! When our lives are... what they are!

  But she'd laughed, her happy laugh, lifting her hair from the nape of her neck with both hands and letting it fall, that mannerism of hers that means a kind of abandon: What the hell!

  "It's your fortieth birthday, Leslie," she tells him, lighting a cigarette, "a one-and-only occasion."

  Leslie is pouring wine for Persia and himself, dark red wine in long-stemmed crystal glasses... that probably aren't too clean.

  Persia is resolved not to notice. He has given Iris a glass of lemonade so sugary it hurts her mouth.

  He says, laughing, to indicate his words are to be taken lightly, "Isn't every occasion 'one and only'?"

  * * * Once, years ago, in Leslie Courtney's studio with its backstage theatrical look, its air of drama and expectancy, when Persia and her little daughter Iris were posing for his camera-on the white wicker love seat, that piece of furniture graceful as the s in calligraphy, a favorite prop of the photographer'sLeslie said in an outburst of candor that his vision as an artist was to photograph every man, woman, and child living in Hammond, New York: "every soul sharing a single instant of time."

  He'd spoken passionately. His pale eyes had a yellowish flare.

  A shaving nick on the underside of his jaw glistened red.

  Persia Courtney cut her eyes at him and laughed.

  "God, Les. Why?"

  Leslie's scratchy old phonograph is playing bright music from The Marriage of Figaro. Still, Iris can hear their voices.

  "He said.

  "Yes, he would. That's... his version." were the one to ask him to leave. And now.

  "Did he pay you back? Or is that another of his lies?"

  "Yes, I'm sure he did... sure he did."

  'Ah, now you're lying!"

  Iris lets the book fall closed, photographs of H. CartierBresson.

  Wanders out of the room. Long-legged as a yearling horse, and restless. They aren't going to miss her.

  There's a lot to look at in Uncle Leslie's "bachelor's quarters : on virtually every square inch of wall space he has hung framed photographs, his own and others', prints, antiquated maps. The interior of a skull crammed with too many thoughts.

  A sly stink of wet sand, brine, fish penetrating the walls. But after a while you don't notice.

  Leslie Courtney has rented the store and the three-room apartment to the rear at 591 North Main Street, Hammond, New York, for the past twelve years, since moving to Hammond from his family hometown in the southern part of the state. First his brother Duke, newly married, moved to Hammond... then Leslie. You would conclude the brothers are close.

  The photography studio itself is small and perpetually cluttered with equipment. Leslie is always buying new cameras, or new camera attachments, or props for his portraits... and not throwing anything out. It's a room lit with a single muted light except when a, blaze of lights is turned on. Thus to Iris, who has seen it since a time when, in the most literal terms, she was incapable of comprehending, let alone remembering, incapable even of comprehending herself as a being of consciousness and identity, the studio has an air familiar as a dream she has visited numberless times yet, awake, has not the power to recall. But there is the sharp razorish odor of chemicals from the darkroom, that odor fierce and familiar.

  A low platform like a child's idea of a stage... the heavy dark velvet drape hung over a plywood partition... the tripod...

  the props... the work counter and shelves crowded with equipment.

  Above the work counter a dozen negatives are clipped to a wire: ghost figures that resolve themselves into human shapes, faces, pairs of eyes, trusting smiles. At what do we smile when we smile into the lens of a camera? Why this trust, this instant's elation? Iris peers at the negatives without touching them-she knows better than to touch them-sees that the subjects, a hand-holding young couple in Sunday clothes, are no one she knows. They have luridly black faces and arms... meaning they are "white" people.

  Iris's uncle once remarked to her that he never took selfportraits as so many other photographers did (Iris had been looking at a portfolio of moody self-portraits in an issue of Camera Arts) because he was always embodied in the photographs he took of other people... even of landscapes, whatever. You couldn't see him, but he was there.

  An absence, he said, but there.

  Iris said she didn't understand... but then, no one understood Leslie Courtney when he talked "serious." Leslie said he didn't understand either, exactly. But that's how it was.

  Leslie Courtney's most representative photographs, accumulated over a period of nearly thirty years, are on permanent, dusty display at the front of the store. Here too things are continually being added, nothing removed: baby pictures, family pictures, brides and grooms in their wedding finery... graduation classes in academic gowns and mortarboards... uniformed American Legionnaires, parading...

  sports teams, Rotary clubs, Sunday school classes, Chambers of Commerce, Flag Day ceremonies, office picnics... Hammond street scenes, views of the Cassadaga River, factories and slag heaps and smokestacks... scenes of the winter countryside... montages of babies and children in which constellations of faces are crowded together, as in a human hive-and in their midst, in no evident relationship to anything else, are photographs of the Courtneys: Iris's father as a dashing young man in his twenties, in a straw hat, a cigarette in a holder jutting FDR-style from his mouth; Duke and Persia as "The Incomparable Courtneys," in elegant formal attire, poised in what appears to be a foxtrot position, arms upraised, legs gracefully stretched, each pair of eyes gaily locking with the camera lens; Persia, very young, a beautiful dreamy full-faced girl, with her infant daughter wrapped in a lacy shawl... and with her year-old daughter... and with her two-year-old daughter... so, it might seem, to infinity. The camera's gaze is waist-high, a technical trick to make the subjects appear taller than the viewer, more exalted. Iris never wants to seek out these photographs but always does. As soon as she walks into the shop.

  Feeling that stab of visceral horror: You are going to die, here"s proof She's on the street in front of her uncle's store, drawing deep hard breaths, fresh charged rain-smelling air. Though there are shafts of bright sunshine piercing the clouds it has begun to rain...

  fat breathless drops. And there's a roiling kind of light. And a rainbow the palest glimmer of a rainbow above the spires of the big bridge.

  Iris breathes deep into the lungs the way Duke and Persia inhale their cigarettes, as if drawing life from them. Iris too has begun to smoke, some... though never in the presence of adults.

  She hears thunder that turns out to be, a minute later, not thunder but the roaring of motorcycles, the revving, gunning, uphill climbing of a dozen Harley-Davidsons on a street below Main, along the river.

  Punks and hoodlums, Iris's father has said o
f the youngish leather-jacketed unshaven men who drive these motorcycles; just steer clear of them, he has warned. Iris looks but cannot see them from where she stands.

  For this afternoon's photography session, Iris is wearing a pale yellow summer dress, eyelet collar and cuffs, and flat-heeled black patent leather "ballerina" shoes, and her snarly hair has been shampooed, vigorously brushed, fixed neatly in place with gold barrettes. Her delicately boned almost-beautiful face gives no suggestion of her thoughts, the crude mean forbidden filthy thoughts that so often assail her, even at dreamy moments.