Lovely, Dark, Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Smila’s Sense of Organic Foods was a small food and herbal supplement store at the edge of the university’s older, central campus. Mickey had seen Angelo Stephanos shopping here, she was sure—she’d exchanged greetings with the man, numerous times—but could not have claimed to know him. He was a short springy gleaming-bald youngish man with a bluntly ugly yet attractive face, olive-dark, with sculpted-looking features like a European film actor of decades ago: burnished skin, dark goatee, flashing smile. Even as a younger faculty member he’d been something of a campus celebrity—often on the local arts TV channel—his photograph in local newspapers. Stephanos gave public lectures on such topics as “The Semiotics of Religious Experience” and “Deconstructing Derrida”; his Introduction to Comparative Religions course had to be capped at three hundred students, not counting a score of community auditors who adored him.

  Now as talk of Stephanos’s death swirled about her Mickey felt a keen sense of loss; and embarrassment to know so little of the man, thus to care so much less than the others cared.

  It was a curiosity, a part of the Stephanos mythos, that the man was usually called by just his surname—“Stephanos”; to students he was “Professor Stephanos.” Mickey, if she’d called him anything, had probably called him “Angelo.”

  She tried to recall if she’d ever exchanged more than a few words with him. At a university gathering, a reception—not recently. And the short bald olive-skinned smiling man with the sculpted-looking face had made a gesture meant to be kindly, courtly—he’d seized both her hands to congratulate her on something, or to compliment her; and Mickey had reacted with surprise, and Stephanos had laughed: “Excuse me! I did not mean to alarm.” (Which wasn’t like Mickey in any case. She was hardly a fastidious or formal sort of person.) She seemed to recall that her husband Cameron had played tennis with Stephanos and mutual friends, years ago in the university courts off Broadmead Avenue where they’d lived for almost ten years. She had an impression of the wiry thick-chested man in tennis whites, with his short muscled legs, bounding about the court and making his opponents swing their rackets desperately, lunge, miss, send balls into the net.

  Another time Abigail Burdine was demanding when this had happened, and how; as if there might yet be some mistake, or loophole, to rebut this news that so upset her.

  Mickey was thinking, with a shudder—(for the air was wet and cold and she hadn’t dressed warmly enough that morning rushing off to the medical center)—how strange, the phenomenon of human attachment and grief; we can care genuinely only for those whom we know; even when the deceased is obviously a much-loved, superior and good man.

  You’d never heard anything but praise for Stephanos. Mickey thought so. Maybe a few demurrals—the man was so vain. (But what male professor, Mickey thought, was not vain in his heart of hearts? And what woman would not wish to be vain, if circumstances rendered such a wish not foolish?) His political allegiances—Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders—his support of the Obama/Biden presidential campaign; his legendary generosity with students, and with younger colleagues; his robust good nature, good humor—(he’d had a reputation perhaps as a European male who appreciated good-looking young women, and attracted them irresistibly)—Mickey felt the loss of all this, that she hadn’t really known; dismay that she and Stephanos had not been social friends, that their social circles had not overlapped.

  Why was that? Hadn’t Cameron liked Angelo Stephanos, or, for whatever reason, hadn’t Angelo Stephanos liked him? Or hadn’t Stephanos liked her? In the University Heights community everyone knew everyone else; everyone’s public-school children were tangled together like distant cousins; yet, lines of social connections were not always evident to the observer. Impossible not to think, as Mickey was now thinking, that she and her husband had been, in an essential sense, excluded.

  What an arduous day! And now, this God-damned rain.

  Mickey had driven to the food store after work to buy a few things she knew her husband wouldn’t have purchased, though his office was closer to Smila’s than her own; food-shopping had once been a mutual enterprise but had become, with the passage of time, a marital chore like others which she and Cameron pushed back and forth between them, never having clearly defined who was responsible for what, and how often. It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did. For Cameron’s position at the university was more important than hers—his career far more important than hers.

  “Would anyone like a ride? I could drive someone home . . .”

  The downpour was lessening. Mickey dared to interrupt the talk of Stephanos’s passing with her offer that was spontaneous, impulsive. She would have to know that most of her companions huddling beneath the overhang would have cars of their own but, as it turned out, both the Nordic-looking math professor and the woman with whom he’d been originally talking had walked to Smila’s, to make just a few purchases.

  “Would you? That would be so kind . . .”

  “Thanks so much!”

  Mickey made a rush for her Toyota which was parked a short distance away, amid mud puddles; almost gaily she tossed groceries into the trunk, and hastily drove back to the store, as if fearing the math professor and his woman companion might have decided that they didn’t need her.

  It was good—this reckless physical exercise. For Mickey was not feeling so very robust. And so, Mickey felt the need to publicly disprove any possibility that she might not be feeling so very robust.

  The woman sat beside her, breathless and distraught, her wetted grocery bags in her arms; the long-limbed professor climbed in the back of the car, urged by Mickey to “just push things aside”—the rear of her Toyota had an air of affable clutter, and it didn’t matter if much of it was pushed onto the floor.

  Mickey felt a childish thrill of excitement, driving these strangers in her car. It was not unlike the thrill you’d feel giving a lift home to popular students in high school—really popular students, or older students, in a clique superior to your own. She had appropriated their intensity, their grief—was that it? For she felt so sadly distant herself, from the late Stephanos.

  But the woman beside her—(the name was Madelyn McCall)—was turned to speak to the man in the backseat—(his name was Andy Funkhauser, as Mickey should have known)—and their continued talk of the deceased Stephanos was distracting to her as she drove in the rain. To her annoyance, they’d forgotten to tell her where to turn until it was too late—“Please, I know you’re upset about your friend, but let’s be practical.” Her voice was sharper than she’d intended. She stared at Funkhauser’s blunt sand-colored face in the rearview mirror. On his head was an idiotic METS cap, soaked with rain.

  Now there was silence in the car. Mickey apologized—“Hey, sorry. Just, I’m a little anxious about driving in this rain.”

  “Oh, we appreciate it! Is it—Mickey? You’re so kind.”

  “Yes! Thanks so much.”

  “You were close friends of Angelo Stephanos, I guess?”—Mickey spoke hesitantly.

  “Yes. I think so. I mean—I’d like to think so.”

  “Yes. My wife and I—we’ve known him and Beata since we moved here from Iowa, eleven years ago. He made us feel so welcome.”

  “I wish I’d known Stephanos better. He was obviously a remarkable individual.”

  Mickey spoke uncertainly, not knowing if this was the right thing to say. Rain lashed against her windshield in a delirium. She was tasting something ugly and metallic in her mouth and the sensation made her want to spit.

  It seemed to her that her words, foolishly inadequate as a paper grocery bag in a downpour, were met by her companions with a stiff sort of embarrassment.

  At a red brick house on Mercer Street Mickey pulled into a driveway, to let Madelyn McCall out; at a Colonial a block away, she pulled into a driveway, to let Andy Funkhauser out. Both McCall and Funkhauser thanked her profusely for the ride but Mickey th
ought

  Will they remember me? Fuck, no.

  SHE’D BEEN TO CHEMO that morning: 7:00 A.M. to 10:00 A.M.

  She was one of the “lucky ones”—she understood. The gastroenterologist who’d discovered her colon cancer had told her You won’t think so right now but when you think back to this day, you will realize that it was the luckiest day of your life.

  Mickey wanted to think so. There were good thoughts and not-so-good thoughts in this matter of fighting cancer.

  It was her secret, or so she hoped. No one but Cameron knew.

  No one at the Institute knew. (Where Mickey was, after six years, still an adjunct instructor with no medical benefits. The enormous cancer costs—surgery, oncology, chemotherapy—were borne entirely by Cameron’s university insurance.) She’d so arranged her schedule this term, her chemotherapy days didn’t intrude upon her work-days; she had not yet missed a class, or even a staff meeting; she liked to think that her colleagues and students would be astonished to know she was undergoing chemotherapy, and why.

  Of course, some mornings even when she hadn’t had chemo recently she could barely force herself out of bed. She could barely drag through the day. All of her effort, and she had to think it was an effort in a good cause, lay in her imposture in public: behaving exactly as she’d always behaved, or a little more so.

  Going to the medical center was trickier. If Mickey encountered people who knew her in the grim infusion room she’d concocted a plausible-sounding story about a deficiency in her gamma globulin count. No one but a practiced clinician could detect the difference between a gamma globulin infusion and the aggressive chemotherapy that involved fluorouracil and oxaliplatin.

  These were chemicals enlisted to kill cancer cells. A strategy not unlike, Mickey had to think, spraying napalm in the jungle in the hope of killing the hidden enemy amid the fecund vegetation.

  Keeping the colon cancer secret was essential to her. Even from her relatives and closest friends. It was a Mickey thing—not wanting sympathy, pity. Not wanting attention. The wrong kind of attention.

  Cameron was willing to keep her secret. He, too, did not want to be the object of sympathy or pity or even marked concern among his colleagues and friends.

  It wasn’t so bad—she’d lost weight. At last, size seven as she hadn’t been since the age of fifteen. Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn’t seen in years turning up looking all wrong. She hadn’t (yet) lost much of her thick dark-blond hair. She hadn’t (yet) had the most extreme side effects of the treatment—fainting, seizures, extreme vomiting and diarrhea, death.

  Sometime in the first night following an infusion her cheeks became flushed as the cheeks of a girl skater in a Norman Rockwell painting and by morning, her right eye was bloody.

  She’d learned to think This is lucky! Only one eye.

  Cameron hadn’t noticed the bloody right eye. Cameron might have noticed the weight loss but said nothing. But then, Cameron hadn’t looked at Mickey very often, in recent months. Nor did Cameron touch her very often, in recent months. An impulse came over her at times to wave her hand in front of his eyes to attract his attention—Hi! This is me, Mickey!—but, then what? Did she really want Cameron’s attention, up close?

  Cameron had reacted to her brassy-chemical breath. She’d only realized belatedly.

  Leaning up to kiss him, just a friendly good-bye kiss as Cameron was about to rush off, and seeing how, just perceptibly, in a way that suggested stoic restraint on his part, Cameron stiffened.

  For of course her breath must smell. The interior of her mouth tasted like battery acid that no amount of mouth-rinsing with alcohol-free mouthwash could dispel.

  Sorry hon. I won’t, any more.

  After dropping off the aggrieved friends of Stephanos, Mickey hadn’t been in the house for more than a few minutes when the phone rang. An agitated-sounding friend was calling from Berkeley—“I just got an e-mail that Angelo Stephanos is dead? Can that be right?”

  “Yes—I think so. I haven’t seen anything official, but . . .”

  “My God! Stephanos! He was just here at Cal, he gave the keynote address at a LAPA conference, really a brilliant, warm man—he was impressed by a paper I gave, and he was going to invite me to your campus—and now . . .”

  Mickey said, sympathetically, “People are very upset here, of course. I mean, people who know him. Knew him. Evidently he was a very charismatic person . . .”

  “I wouldn’t call it ‘charismatic’—that sounds phony and shallow. Stephanos just radiated life. I’d been feeling kind of depressed about some things, and he really listened to me and said the most thoughtful, subtle things. I scarcely knew him but he said that when I came there to give a talk, he hoped I’d stay with him and his family.”

  This friend had stayed with Mickey and Cameron in the past, visiting their campus. The gratitude with which he spoke of Stephanos’s invitation was slightly hurtful.

  “He died at home? In his bathroom, in the shower? They’re saying an aneurysm? My God.”

  “Or a heart attack . . .”

  “Just like that! Terrifying.”

  “Well. It might have been merciful, so abrupt. He wouldn’t have known what was happening.”

  Hesitantly Mickey offered her friend this banal consolation. But her friend seemed scarcely to be listening.

  “Is Cam there?”

  “No.”

  “He knew Stephanos, right?”

  “Did he? Not well.”

  “I’ll call later. We can commiserate.”

  “E-mail is best, with Cameron. You know how he is about phone messages.”

  Their friend—who was Cameron’s friend from graduate school days at the University of Minnesota, not so much Mickey’s friend—didn’t hang up immediately but reviewed, in a voice of genuine loss, how exceptionally gracious—and helpful—Angelo Stephanos had been to him, when he’d sent him a rough first draft of his new book on the “politics” of transgendered texts; the book had just been published by Cal-Berkeley Press and one of the few but laudatory reviews cited points that Stephanos had supplied, which he’d intended to write Stephanos about, to thank him. But—he’d procrastinated. And now it was too late.

  Of all that he’d missed by dying, Mickey thought, a thank-you e-mail from an ambitious younger colleague would probably not have been paramount to Stephanos.

  But she had to console Cameron’s friend, who was genuinely upset. She was feeling how bizarre the situation, in this matter of the evidently catastrophic death of Angelo Stephanos: she understood it was a personal loss, possibly a flaw of character, to be unable to share in the commiseration others felt so naturally.

  “Angelo Stephanos certainly was beloved,” Mickey said dryly. “When most of us die, we’ll be lucky to be missed.”

  But this was mean-spirited, adolescent. This did not come out as Mickey meant it, as a statement of fact. Fortunately the friend in Berkeley hadn’t heard.

  “Stephanos was such an ageless person, somehow. He was so alive. Jesus! This is a shock. . . . I should call—is it Beatrice? Beata? She must be devastated . . .”

  Beata Stephanos? Mickey tried to recall if she’d ever met this woman.

  “Tell Cam I called, will you? And if there’s a memorial service for Stephanos—of course, there will be—I’ll try to get there.”

  “Yes. Of course. You can stay with us. Please.”

  Please. Was Mickey begging him, this man who was her husband’s friend, whom she scarcely knew?

  Of course, she’d spoken spontaneously. She was a generous person only because she was heedless and reckless; this was not a virtue, but you could see how it might be mistaken for a virtue.

  Mickey hung up the phone and wandered into the kitchen like a dazed person—seeing, there, the wetted grocery bags on the counter. She had to put away the groceries—(of course, Cameron wasn’t here to help her)—and she had to think about—whatever it was, she had to think about—something urgent and e
ssential in her own life that was a million pixels swirling in a thunder-cloud about to burst.

  HER PROBLEM, Mickey thought, began with Mickey.

  It was a high school name. It had been the perfect, gratifying, coveted high school name. Mickey quite suited her long legs on the basketball court, her streaked blond ponytail swinging with its own antic life, her quick unfettered high-pitched and spontaneous laughter; Mickey was funny and sexy and good-looking (if not beautiful) with a smooth freckled face, creamy skin and wide-set sea-green eyes and a sly sweet smile—so you could forgive her for also being a good student, one of the half-dozen excellent students in her class, and one of the few who’d gone on to a university career, and then to graduate school. (B.A. in biology, Ph.D. combining in ecology/evolutionary biology.)

  It was a Mickey thing to make jokes about the artificial-vein implant in her upper-right chest, that allowed blood to be taken, fluids to be dripped into it, without the excruciating usual routine of a nurse poking for a vein; and it was a Mickey thing to make jokes about the plastic chemo-bottle she sometimes had to carry, in secret, in a jazzy black fanny-pack around her waist, that fed more chemicals into the artificial vein to be carried, via her bloodstream, throughout her body. And it was a Mickey thing to joke about the “Sexuality” section of the Medical Center Patient Chemotherapy Handbook:

  Women Undergoing Chemotherapy May Experience the Following:

  Lack of sexual desire

  Vaginal dryness

  Discomfort during intercourse

  Inability to experience orgasm

  Hot flashes

  Interruption of menstrual cycle

  Note: DO NOT CEASE BIRTH CONTROL.

  BIRTH CONTROL IS STILL NECESSARY.

  Mickey had to laugh. It was funny—Discomfort during intercourse!—this was tantamount to suggesting, to a quadriplegic, that he/she might experience some muscular discomfort while sprinting.