A Fair Maiden

by Oates, Joyce Carol

  Katya stammered, "Th-this is a—joke, isn't it? Please, Mr. Kidder, it's a joke, right? You're laughing at me right now—aren't you?"

  But Mr. Kidder wasn't laughing, just smiling. "You will have plenty of time to make a wise decision, Katya. You will not be rushed. I am utterly serious, of course. Funny Bunny is always utterly serious, even as he is a very funny bunny. And I will be true to my word to reward you generously. Before the ... occasion, as well as after. You've learned, dear Katya, that you can trust me to pay you generously, yes?"

  Katya pressed her hands against her ears. How terrible this conversation was! Her eyes flooded with tears of vexation. "I don't b-believe you, Mr. K-Kidder! You are—you are joking, aren't you! Except this is not funny..."

  "Katya, on the morning we first met, I'd just come from my nephrologist's office—and just the previous day from my gastro-enterologist's office. Such fancy words, eh? Pray, dear Katya, in the heedless health of youth, you will never learn what they mean. And the news was both good and not so good: after a siege of somewhere beyond eighteen months of radiation and chemotherapy, Marcus Kidder had been diagnosed as—seemingly! tentatively!—in remission. And was this good or not so good news? For if you are in remission—and not for the first time, it pains me to admit—you must live with the shadow over your head, like a black thunderhead, that there will come a time, perhaps soon—no fear, it will come—when you are no longer in remission, when you must again be strapped into zapping machines and injected with sizzling chemicals, and must endure again what you'd only just managed to endure. By which time—for time weakens us all—it may be too late to act upon your deepest wish, which is a wish that can be fulfilled only when you are strong and clear-minded and, indeed, in remission—succinctly put, not to be. 'To cease upon the midnight with no pain.' For everyone waits too long in such matters. As the aged King knows, having seen too many others in the last grasping, gasping months of their desperate lives..."

  Katya heard some of this. Katya heard as much as she wanted to hear of this. He wants me to help him die. Help him kill himself. That is what he wants of me! Desperate now to escape this stifling room, this terrible place; how trapped she felt here, drugged, paralyzed, desperate to get back to her room in the Engelhardts' house before anyone knew she was missing. Mr. Kidder was on his feet with the intention of helping Katya walk, for her legs were unsteady, but Katya shoved at the strange bald man, whom she hardly knew—"No! Don't touch me!"—made her way, stumbling, to the bathroom, locked the door behind her, and hurriedly dressed, seeing in the mirror a girl's pale, sickly, frightened face. Yes, but Katya was angry too, Katya was damned angry, fumbling with her clothing, taking no heed that she'd pulled the top on backward, kicking her feet into her sandals; she was furious and trembling, unlocking the door and pushing past the disgusting old man hovering just outside, damned old baldie-head, scruffy baldie-head, like her own grandfather Spivak he was, an elderly sick pitiable man yet like a vulture, the hungry eyes, the disgusting mouth sucking at her energy. In the street Katya wouldn't have given such a man a second glance; on Ocean Avenue that morning, if he hadn't been wearing his snowy white wig and hadn't been dressed so elegantly and carried a cane and had such an upright posture, she'd have turned away from him at once, hurried little Tricia and the baby away from him, for here was Death plucking at her wrist, here was Death wanting to embrace her. Katya threw him off, threw off his hand from her wrist; such curses sprang from her mouth as she'd been hearing for much of her life in Vineland, Fuck you, the hell with you, goddamn you bastard leave me alone, as she fumbled to snatch up her bag, ignored the old man's apologies, his pleas, his offer to pay her, goddamn. Katya was too furious and too agitated to remain in this terrible place another moment, but pushed out the door, outside and into the night. At once the fresh chill ocean air revived her, and the smell of the ocean, the angry slap-slap-slap of the surf; she was running to the front gate, and behind her Marcus Kidder's uplifted voice: "Think it over, Katya! The offer—the King—will be waiting for you."

  24

  Will not, I will not. God damn him to hell—he has no right.

  Killing is a sin! He can't make me do this.

  He touched me. Did things to me in my sleep.

  I don't love him. I could not love an old, sick, dying man.

  25

  At the yacht club beach in the presence of Tricia Engelhardt, whose endearingly clumsy surf-wading Katya was supervising, Katya managed to score from the lanky nineteen-year-old lifeguard, receiving from his hand a single mashed joint and a single OxyContin with the promise from Katya that they'd hook up Friday night at a club in town, and Katya said Sure! in her nerved-up state, turning away before thinking to say And thanks! over her shoulder as the dark-tanned boy, whose name she'd have to think hard to recall—Dave? Dan?—stared after her the way a hungry carnivore might gaze after something smaller and warm-blooded. Later, back at the Engelhardts', fortified by the OxyContin, Katya dared to call Roy Mraz at her uncle Fritzie's garage in Vineland, an act that might have the effect of tossing a lighted match—casually, recklessly—into dried and desiccated underbrush, though telling herself It's a roll of the dice and the decision was out of her hands, as Katya's father used to say with a smile and a shrug: You roll the dice but how the damned dice fall is out of your power, and Jude Spivak was right. And Katya was thinking that Roy Mraz wouldn't be at the garage in Vineland any longer, he'd have moved on by now, and she would be spared what she was going to do, for part of her was frightened of her own rage, but there came Roy's voice, abrupt and startling in her ear—Hey, Katya? That you?—and Katya felt faint, as if the oxygen in her brain had been shut off, as if Roy Mraz had prankishly shoved his hand into her chest to squeeze her beating heart with his fingers; and there came words pouring from her in the voice of a hurt and vindictive child: There is this man here! In Bayhead Harbor! He drugged me, put his hands on me, asked me to do a terrible thing! A disgusting thing! He's a rich man, a rich old man here in Bayhead. And Roy broke in, laughing: Whoa! What the hell, Katz? What're you telling me? And Katya's throat shut, she stammered and could only just beg: Help me, Roy. Come here and help me, Roy, I'm so afraid.

  And so it was, tossing the lighted match.

  "My cousin is driving up from Vineland, Mrs. Engelhardt. After I put Tricia to bed, I have to go out for a while."

  It was a statement, not a plea, nor even a request. Seeing the look in Katya's face of something ravaged and torn, Mrs. Engelhardt must have considered asking her sixteen-year-old nanny if something serious was wrong, but just said, with a prissy frown, "Don't stay out too late, please! We have a busy day tomorrow."

  That night he came for her in a steel-colored SUV that resembled a military vehicle. Its chassis rode high on oversized black tires and on its rust-flecked front grille were the letters RAMCHARGER. Anxious and excited, Katya climbed up into the passenger's seat, and Roy Mraz leaned over and grabbed her and kissed her hard and pushed her from him, baring stained shark teeth in a laugh. "All growed up, eh?"

  This was the first time Katya had seen Roy Mraz in more than eighteen months. The first time since Roy had been released on parole from the State Facility for Men at Glassboro, where he'd been sentenced to three years on counts of aggravated assault, possession of an unlicensed firearm, resisting arrest. Roy had been involved in drugs too, but he hadn't had drugs in his possession when he'd been arrested. Close beside Roy Mraz now, Katya felt a stab of alarm, apprehension. Roy was older; his features were coarser, his jaws covered in dark stubble. His bluish black hair was shaved brutally close to his skull on the sides of his head and grew long, wiry, and springy at the crown in what might have been south Jersey biker style. Katya saw a two-inch scar above Roy's left eye that she'd never seen before. Roy had gained weight in prison, muscled flesh in his torso and shoulders and neck; on his beefy right forearm Katya saw a smudged tattoo of something like a flaming dagger. He wore stained khakis, biker's boots, a blue and yellow Eagles jersey. His driv
ing was aggressive and erratic, and when he stopped for a red light on Ocean Avenue, he pulled Katya to him again and kissed her as he'd kissed her before, hard, and quick, and no sentiment in it, a kiss that was a warning. Swiftly he ran his hands over her, up inside her shirt, squeezing her ribs, her breasts in a cotton bra, and the flesh at the small of her back as a belligerent blind man might do, to establish her identity to him and his claim over her.

  "Missed you, baby! A lot."

  With an air of reproach Roy Mraz spoke, as if daring Katya to believe him.

  As if I'd miss you, my kid cousin. All the girls and women a guy like me has, who are crazy for him.

  Along Ocean Avenue Roy drove them out of the affluent Village of Bayhead Harbor south along the highway into a countryside of small ranch houses, trailer parks, and mini-malls and at last into a stretch of sand dunes, sand grasses, scrub trees growing low against the ground. Briny ocean air tinged with a smell of dead and decaying fish rushed at their faces. Roy was smoking a joint and he passed it to Katya, who took it eagerly, for she was very nervous, had no idea what Roy Mraz would do, no more (maybe) than Roy Mraz himself knew, for Roy Mraz and his brothers and friends were guys who behaved impulsively, though sometimes by calculation, and you had to wonder which was worse. Katya was recalling how Roy Mraz had taken her out when she'd been scarcely fourteen years old and had flirted with him, must've been that Katya had been one of those girls who'd been crazy for Roy Mraz without knowing much about him, and he'd laughed at her, saying, It won't hurt, Katya, not much, and, by the time it was too late for Katya to change her mind, Just this first time, maybe. Katya had not wanted to think how this past year in Vineland she'd been hearing rumors that Roy Mraz had done things in prison—or maybe things had been done to Roy Mraz in prison—but Katya hadn't known what these things were alleged to be. (From her grandfather Spivak, who'd been a prison guard at Glassboro for more than thirty years, Katya had an idea.) And it was said—Katya was remembering only now, as if mists were lifting slowly, revealing a devastated landscape—that this young man who was, or was not, her blood relative had helped two older men rob a gas station when he'd been nineteen, and when the proprietor rushed at them with a baseball bat, one of the men panicked and shot him several times in the chest and he'd died on the floor of the gas station on the outskirts of Atlantic City, and if Roy Mraz hadn't been the one who'd fired the gun, he'd been an accomplice. Felony murder, this was. Katya was in a speeding SUV with an individual whom she scarcely knew who had committed felony murder, and yet ... she must have wanted this, for she'd called Roy Mraz, and she'd summoned him to her, and he was here.

  How many crimes, how many murders go unsolved, unpunished? This was not TV or movies or mystery novels in which crimes were always solved and criminals brought to justice, this was actual life. What a man is sentenced for, what a man does time for, is never all that a man has done, Katya had heard adults say with grim satisfaction. Such knowledge made her shiver, for it could not be refuted.

  In a desolate place off Route 37, Roy parked the steel-colored Ramcharger. At the base of a raggedy sand dune he kissed Katya with his big bared teeth, called her Katz, called her baby, said he couldn't believe how hot she was, last time he'd seen her she was just a kid, Jesus he'd missed her! Pulling impatiently at her clothes as a child might tug in frustration at something that did not yield immediately, and so quickly Katya removed her pretty things before Roy Mraz ripped them; within seconds then Roy Mraz was lying on her, the weight of his large heated body on her made it difficult for Katya to breathe, and there was Roy pushing himself deep inside Katya, grunting with the effort, hard and quick and without sentiment, and there was Roy's grimacing mouth pressed against Katya's mouth, hurting the tender flesh of her lips, nothing tender in Roy Mraz's kiss as there had been in Mr. Kidder's kisses, but Katya was not going to think of Marcus Kidder now, Katya wished never to think of Marcus Kidder in this way. Not ever wishing to think, But he is the one who loves you, not this one! Mr. Kidder is the only one who knows you and loves you or will ever love you in all your life. Gamely Katya tried to embrace Roy Mraz's sweaty muscled shoulders, tried to kiss him and murmur to him words to please and to placate. It disturbed her that Roy's lovemaking was rapid and impersonal, as if he were hardly aware of Katya Spivak and only of a pliant female body into which he pumped himself, panting and grunting, still with that air of impatience as the back of Katya's head was struck against the hard-packed sand beneath them—Oh! it hurt. Oh, oh! Katya bit her lip to keep from crying out, tried not to sob so that the man would think it must be a sexual sensation she was feeling and not chafing and pain, and even now she was thinking, Do I know him? Do I want this? until finally it was over and Roy rolled off her, heavy and leaden in the aftermath of passion like a corpse; and for some time they lay side by side, not touching, panting, stunned, like strangers struck down by a single catastrophic blow in a litter-strewn desolate place off Route 37, and like a child's cry heard at a distance, the thought came to Katya: But maybe he will love me now?

  Roy had rented a room on the highway, he said. He'd be staying the night—maybe two nights—and Katya could stay with him and get back to the place where she worked early, before they missed her; or maybe, if things worked out right, Katya could quit the damn job, and the hell with it. Roy was sitting up and brushing sand from the dark curly wires that sprouted from his chest, fumbling for a cigarette out of a pocket of his khaki pants, tossed down nearby. He lit the cigarette, exhaled smoke in a luxurious stream, and said, with a mean-boy smile, "This guy you told me about on the phone. Who 'did things' to you? He's rich, you said? How rich?"

  26

  Roll the dice, see what happens. Why the hell not?

  Must've been a kind of boastfulness—she'd directed Roy Mraz into the Village of Bayhead Harbor, wanting to impress him. Heard Roy Mraz whistle thinly through his teeth, muttering Shit! and Fuck! and Jeez-uz!, seeing what he could of the dazzling oceanside houses and the small sea of yachts and sailboats in the lighted marina and then into the historic district and along leafy Proxmire Street lined with tall sculpted smooth-barked plane trees that glimmered by moonlight. And by this time they'd gotten high together smoking ice in the Sand Dollar Motel—granular crystal meth that Roy had scored from his Atlantic City dealer. (And was Roy himself dealing, on a small scale, in Vineland? From remarks he made to Katya, and a hint that he wouldn't be working at Fritzie's garage much longer, this seemed likely.) (And would Roy take Katya with him if he left Vineland? High on ice, every other word uttered with a breathy giggle, Katya could plausibly think, Maybe.) And so, directing Roy Mraz in the steel-colored military vehicle along genteel Proxmire Street. Liking how Roy stared scowling at the private homes the size of small hotels that were tauntingly visible through openings in the privet hedges, and feeling a thrill of pride when Roy whistled, saying, "You've been in there?" when Katya pointed out Mr. Kidder's house. Roy braked the Ramcharger to a stop at the curb and leaned out the window to peer at the near-darkened shingleboard house, which by moonlight was like a house in a children's picture book of some bygone time, and like nothing in all of Vineland, New Jersey. And Katya said, Yes, sure, she'd been inside.

  A tingling sensation inside her head. That sensation of something finely vibrating, electric current rippling through it, you wanted to think it wasn't the drug but your truest self, your self that wasn't fearful of anything and did not frankly give a shit about anything except Now! now now and not instead But I don't want this really—do I? This is a mistake—isn't it? as Roy sat brooding and grimacing, staring at Marcus Kidder's beautiful house from a distance of less than fifty feet, and Katya's thoughts came drifting at her in misshapen cartoon balloons that, if you grabbed at them, would slip from your fingers and drift away. Roy was asking Katya how she'd hooked up with this guy, and Katya told him in a voice of naive earnestness that his name was Marcus Kidder and he was a famous man in Bayhead Harbor and he knew everyone because he belonged to all the private clubs. H
e must have recognized the Engelhardt children when he saw them with Katya in the park; and so it happened that Mr. Kidder invited them to tea-time at his house, where they sat on a terrace overlooking the ocean; and Mr. Kidder showed Katya paintings on the walls of his studio, for it turned out that he was an artist; and he asked her if she'd like to pose for him sometime, and so—"What kind of artist?" Roy interrupted suspiciously, and Katya said, as if protesting, "A real artist! A serious artist like you'd see in a museum. And Mr. Kidder is a writer, too, he's done children's books that are in the library," and Roy said, "So this old guy paid you, eh? To pose for him?" and Katya said, "Yes," and Roy said, sneering, "With your clothes on or off?" and Katya laughed, saying, "Mostly on," and Roy said, "What'd he do to you, Katz—did he fuck you?" and Katya said, her voice now lowered, less certain, "He put s-something in a drink, and I—I guess I passed out. I don't know all that he did," and Roy laughed harshly, as if in disgust at her, and Katya was confused, not knowing what she'd said or meant to say or why her mouth was so dry, why she was swallowing compulsively as if granules of sand had gotten into her mouth.

  For some minutes Roy Mraz sat silently contemplating the shingleboard house glimmering in the moonlight, visible in the opening in the privet hedge for the circular driveway. It was then that headlights moved suddenly upon them from an oncoming vehicle and Katya tasted panic—what if this was a Bayhead Harbor police cruiser, what if they were discovered and arrested for trespassing, they could be arrested, couldn't they? in this neighborhood, at this hour? But the vehicle with the blinding headlights passed by and was revealed to be an ordinary car. Abruptly then Roy squeezed Katya's bare knee hard, hard enough to make her wince, as if he'd decided something and it was a decision he felt good about. Saying, "So you took money from this Kidder, baby. So whatever he did to you, he paid you. So he won't mind paying you a little more."