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

by Because It Is Bitter

  Though now it's another sort of thought entirely, sudden as a flash of summer lightning: He's going to show up here, today! Of course! His brother's fortieth birthday!

  Persia slices wedges of birthday cake for the three of them, Persia holds the knife out commandingly for Leslie Courtney to lick. "Is the frosting good?" she asks. There's a bright aggressive edge to her voice; the wine has brought a flush to her face.

  Leslie grins like a boy and says, "Yes, yes, very.

  The scratchy old phonograph is playing orchestral music from Carmen, turned low.

  Persia smiles and jokes with Leslie, and then for some reason she's staring... and not smiling. She is possibly thinking, This isn't the one, this is the brother. Then the crystal face of her wristwatch catches her eye. "Oh, damn! I have to make a telephone call, Les. Do you mind?"

  Certainly Les doesn't mind.

  He's curious about whom Persia might be calling but he doesn't mind.

  And he's too much of a gentleman to ask.

  Persia makes the call at the front of the shop, as if not wanting to be overheard. And Leslie and Iris are left alone together..

  slightly uncomfortable together... for Leslie is thinking that he should say something to Iris about Duke Courtney's behavior, his inexplicable behavior these past several months, for which Leslie feels a confused sort of guilt; and Iris, stuffing her mouth with cake, is hoping Leslie won't say anything about Duke except that he will be coming over this afternoon, he's late but he means to help us celebrate, he wanted you and your mother to be surprised.

  Leslie says awkwardly, "Your angel food cake is certainly a success, Iris."

  Iris shrugs as if embarrassed, or annoyed. "Oh, they made us learn, Uncle Leslie, in school. All the girls have to take home economics class starting in seventh grade." Suddenly she's laughing, an angry sort of laugh. "Making beds, learning to cook, sewing skirts, aprons, pot holders. My God, pot holders!"

  Leslie says reprovingly, "But the cake is delicious. Much better than bakery cake."

  "Is it?"

  It seems rude, Persia gone so long.

  In Leslie Courtney, Duke's handsome patrician features have been smudged as if by a mischievous giant thumb. His eyes are beautiful and gold-flecked and shy and squinty. His hair is the color of damp sandpaper, shading to gray. His prim, boyish glasses give him an air of perpetual expectation, like a man always on tiptoe. Iris has overheard her father joking that her uncle Leslie has been in love with Persia for twelve years... but why is that a joke?

  Above Leslie's head, on the wall, is a large framed photomontage, one of the "constellations" he used to make out of numberless miniature photographs of children. In it, hundreds of children's faces are squeezed together in a vertiginous crush, multiplied by mirroring and repetition techniques in the shape of a Christmas tree: MERRY CHRISTMAS 1949! the caption reads in silver lettering.

  Both white and Negro children are in the composition. Iris recalls that her own face, at the age of seven, is somewhere in the design, in fact several times, but she has forgotten where.

  The effect of the Christmas tree constellation is less one of celebration, which Iris's uncle had intended, than that of a smothering cascade of humanity. Staring at it, you feel your breath start to quicken.

  But since Leslie sees her staring at the composition Iris is led to say, not altogether sincerely, that it's too bad he doesn't do the constellations any longer, and Leslie says, Yes," with an air of perplexed hurt, "I think so too. I never understood why the people you'd expect to be most enthusiastic, the children's parents, didn't support them... some were even unpleasant. I was even accused of being 'eccentric' by a columnist for the Chronicle, a self-styled critic." Considering the composition on the wall, Leslie appears, in profile, brooding and almost angry, like Duke Courtney recalling an old injustice. He says, I was applying a law of nature to art, as I always do in my noncommercial work. I don't remember the precise principle now but it was a sort of mathematical formula... the same faces repeated, some in mirror reversals. The symmetry of faces, the symmetry of the Christmas tree.... You know Iris, you're in the tree somewhere."

  Iris says, "Maybe the faces are too small. For the parents' taste, I mean." She speaks hurriedly, before Leslie can get to his feet to look for her miniature face. She feels a sickish dread of seeing it.

  Leslie says stubbornly, "But that was the idea of the constellation as a form. And theme, too-individual faces are small, in the ":r't'eof 3life. Obviously!"

  /r"if"fsc, 5Jie u kno"c, 1ces and coi'ored mixed... that offends some people. Some parents.

  Leslie shrugs. This might be a revelation to him, but he isn't in a mood to pursue it. Instead, he refills his wineglass. Though Persia's glass is two thirds full, he refills it too. To the very brim.

  Quivering.

  By five o'clock, when they are in the photography studio, the storm begins in earnest, pelting rain. The wind shifts to several winds, rocking the building. There is genuine lightning now and loud cracking thunder, the waning light soft as cinders and a taste as of burning in the air... but in the studio they feel themselves sheltered.

  Safe.

  Posing in the blaze of lights, Persia says, "I've heard that savage people won't allow their pictures to be taken because they think their souls will be stolen from them... but it's not that way with me.

  Whenever I see a picture of myself! think, There's proof: I really am here."

  Her telephone call seems to have raised her spirits. Made her into a prism in which ordinary light becomes radiant. And she has deftly freshened up her face for the camera: Revlon powder with a fruity scent and bright red lipstick curving to her lips in a smile more natural than her own.

  And there's the wine. Wine helps.

  In the photography studio, Leslie Courtney is all business.

  He's quick, deft, unerring. Bending over Persia and Iris, adjusting lights on poles, checking the degree of light as it bounces off skin, contemplating his subjects as a single subject: a problem in composition. Strange, he can look at them, now without love.

  In a juvenile murmur Iris says, "If you aren't here, Mum, where are you?" But Persia lets the taunt slide by, doesn't even hear.

  Mother and daughter are posed sitting together on the white wicker love seat-whose paint has begun to flake off and at Persia's elbow there is a white vase containing one dozen whitestemmed roses. Persia is wearing a gauzy summer dress with an iridescentgreenish sheen, pearls around her neck, pearls screwed into her ears. The boat-necked bodice of the dress fits her full breasts snugly, and she has crossed one restless leg over the other: the kind of woman who is clearly not the age she seems but years older.

  Though she and the girl beside her don't in fact resemble each other very much, it's obvious that they are related.

  Sisters, perhaps.

  Iris says, irritated, "Don't, Momma, that tickles."

  Persia says, "I'm just trying to wet down this little curl or whatever.

  .. you don't want it to stick out, do you? You're the one who never can stand to see how you look."

  "Uncle Leslie can retouch it."

  "Uncle Leslie can't work miracles."

  Iris squirms, uncomfortably warm under the lights. And the lights always make her uneasy, resentful, put her in mind of the tonsillectomy she'd had at the age of five, Momma and Daddy assuring her it was nothing, wouldn't hurt, just "going to sleep," and there wA g,. 4

  Am/y tened to her face as she struggled and screamed.

  .

  . the adults, surgeon, nurses, attendants, calmly observing as she pitched forward and died.

  Though the storm has broken the air is still humid, close. Iris feels sweat prickling at all her pores. She blames Persia for making her wear this damned dress, the collar, the cuffs.... She says, in an undertone, 'A true artist can work miracles. A true artist can do any damn thing."

  "Don't say 'damn."" "You say 'damn' all the time. You say a lot worse."

  "That's my privi
lege, Miss Smartie," Persia says. She laughs, belches, disguises it as a hiccup. "The privilege of the damned."

  Iris scratches at an armpit, she's so suddenly miserable.

  Where is he? Why is he making them wait so long?

  Iris says meanly, but somehow it turns out pleading, "Oh, Momma, you say such extravagant things."

  Leslie Courtney is hunched under the black cloth, behind his camera on its tripod: the beautiful expensive Kodak that is the grand gesture of his professional life up until now. Sometimes he's wakened in the night as by a stabbing toothache, wondering how he dared buy himself such a camera, how his income, his "prospects for the future," justify such an expenditure.

  Each time he studies that woman under the lights, through the viewer, through the cameras clinical eye, he is amazed.

  reduced to an intimidated silence. It's an uncanny power Persia Courtney possesses, to light up her face at will-shining eyes, seemingly radiant smile-forehead smooth and unlined as if she were still nineteen years old, all adult strife, all marital heartbreak, yet to come, not even imagined.

  Beside her, Iris appears to disadvantage. It is as if Persia has stolen all light from her daughter: she's an old-young child with sallow skin, dents beneath her eyes, tension in her jaw. Leslie feels a pang of guilt. He flinches from seeing, in a thirteen-year-old child, that small hard skull pushing through the flesh.

  So he teases her, as he has done, here, behind the camera atop the tripod, for years: "Iris-can't you give us a smile?" He says, "When you were a little girl I'd bribe you with peppermint lollipops.

  Remember?"

  She remembers. She smiles. Tries to smile. That quick happyseeming smile, like Persia's.

  Tucked close beside her, Persia maintains her radiant pose. Her mind clearly elsewhere, Persia, beneath the lights, is perfect.

  "Some people"-Leslie sighs-"have to be bribed even into happiness.

  He begins to click the shutter. At last.

  Until, a half hour later, the lights suddenly go out.

  Persia and Iris cry out in unison; Leslie stares transfixed into darkness, utter pitch-blackness where there'd been, an instant before, such light.

  The storm has shut off their power. He should have expected it. He says, "Stay where you are, Persia! Iris! I'll get candles.

  .. just stay where you are. You might hurt yourself in the dark."

  It's going to be all right, he tells himself. He has enough shots, he has some heart-stopping shots, he won't be cheated.

  It's one of those mean gusty late-summer storms, blowing down from Lake Ontario: rain drumming against the windows, forks of lightning above the river, peals of thunder. Like wartime, Persia observes, in the movies.

  They light candles, the three of them, shivering and excited as children, and grope their way to the front of Leslie's shop, to stand for some entranced minutes watching the storm-rain on the pavement like the tracery of machine-gun fire, veined flashes of lightning-then the thunder, which is deafening. Persia says as if thinking aloud, "This decides it: I'd be crazy to go out tonight!"

  At the back, in Leslie's snug bachelor's quarters, they wait out the storm. There's an air of shelter here, secrecy, coziness.

  With a flourish, as if he'd long been waiting for this moment, Leslie lights a kerosene lamp; like most Hammond residents he's prepared for power failures. Persia says luxuriously, "This is unexpected."

  Leslie empties the bottle of wine into her glass and into his; in a murmur Persia adds, "Fun."

  Iris is too restless to sit with the adults. She moves from window to window watching the storm. The air is fresh, edged with chill, smelling of rain, something sulfurous-a smell like the river, too-mixed with the briny odor from the fish store adjacent and the garbage cans in the alley. Where rain pelts, hammers, drums, slams like drunken revelers. Is this what she has been waiting for, these hours?

  She thinks, I hate you all. I don't need you, not a one of you.

  She thinks, I'm happy.

  By the gauzy halo of light from the kerosene lamp they finish the bottle of wine, then begin a bottle of Leslie's favorite bourbon.

  Leslie Courtney is thinking, The woman is a prism in which ordinary light, refracted, reimagined, becomes radiant.

  Persia says, "In a flash of lightning it's as if your skull is pried open, isn't it? And you're spilled out, somehow? Not you-who-you re but youinside-of you. As if the world is ending and you see how silly you've been, and petty, and small-minded, and stupid, thinking the wrong things mattered, all along. Does that make sense?" She laughs nervously, yet is pleased with her words. She is a woman whom men have so often flattered with their attentiveness to her words, such pleasure comes as a reflex.

  Leslie has been staring at her. "What? Does what make sense?"

  "I must be drunk."

  "No, you're not."

  "I'm not, I can't be. I've only had... I haven't had much." She watches Iris pasSing through a room, two doorways away, a longlegged child, headstrong, secretive, with a look of deep hurt..

  .

  Why hadn't Persia had a second baby, before it was too late? She says carefully, "This rain! It's like we're inside Niagara Falls.

  Washing everything away... all the dirt." There is a long pause.

  A lightning flash, and a beat of several seconds, and resounding thunder the electrical storm at the heart of the rainstorm is moving to the east. She says in a lowered voice, suddenly urgent, "It's true, what he told you. I was the one who asked him to leave. So that I could think. So that I wouldn't always just... feel." She adds bitterly, "Duke has that effect upon women. He counts on it."

  "Does he!" Leslie murmurs.

  Persia says, "When I found out he'd betrayed me, gone outside the marriage-" "Betrayed you? How do you mean?" Leslie asks. "Not with other women?"

  "In different ways, Persia says quickly. "I don't want to go into details. If you love and trust someone he can betray you with a word.

  .. an expression on his face. You know. Or maybe," she says carelessly, "you don't know."

  "Well," says Leslie, smiling at his long bony fingers, "that's possible."

  "When I first found out, I was almost happy... the way you are when something has been decided for you. Because when you love another person there is something off-center in you, like, you know your soul is partly inside that person; it's been drawn out of you and it's in someone else? and might be injured? And you can't know you really can't know if it won't be? My parents are just farm people I guess you would say I mean, Duke did say simple people I suppose, they're Methodists, and they believe in Jesus Christ as their redeemer, and that sort of thing, but if you asked them to explain or to analyze, the way Duke analyzes things, to shed a little light on the subject, as Duke says, they'd clam up.

  they'd be embarrassed and resentful. Because there are things you don't talk about. Because there aren't the words. And falling in love with someone so different from yourself and anyone you know getting married, having a baby, starting a family, living, you know an adult life, living what you believe to be an adult life, a real lifenobody talks about these things, nobody seems to know the words.

  Like dancing, and suddenly the old steps aren't there for you, or the beat is wrong, so you have to improvise." She speaks quickly, half angrily, lifting her hair from the nape of her neck and fanning it out and letting it fall several times, not knowing what she does.

  "But you love him," Leslie says softly.

  "But I can't live with him," Persia says. She smiles, she's triumphant. "I won't."

  So they talk together, Leslie and Persia. It is as if they're beneath a waterfall, sheltered there, snug and secretive and conspiratorial.

  They talk in lowered voices... drift into silence..

  resume talking again... following the natural drift, Leslie Courtney is thinking, of whatever happens.

  There is the conviction in him, lodged in his breast like a heartbeat , that an understanding of a profound sort is passing between h
im and Persia Courtney... if only Persia will remember in the morning.

  Says Duke Courtney reverently, "Is there anywhere on earth more.

  .

  . unearthly... than a racetrack on the day of a big race?"

  At Schoharie Downs, this first Saturday in October, the air has a brittle whitish cast. The sky is a perfect blue like washed glass.

  It's the afternoon of the Eastern States Sires harness-racing competition for two-year-old trotters, and the stands, which will seat approximately nine thousand people, are quickly filling.

  Voices sound and resound like windblown strips of confetti; a giant American flag whips raglike above the green-shingled clubhouse roof.