Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Instead, she took Woody’s hands in hers. He wasn’t responding, so she squeezed harder. “I’m sorry, Woody. I won’t pursue it. I know, well—how you take things. How hard.”

  Woody mumbled something that sounded like sure. It was adolescent-boy sarcasm, clumsily disguised hurt.

  Yvonne slid her arms around his muscled neck and pressed her face against his muscled-fatty chest. His heart beat beneath her cheek like a fist. She drew a deep, deep breath. If Woody’s arms closed around her, or even if they didn’t, she was feeling good now, she was feeling somehow justified. She had been the one to blurt out to Woody Clark that she missed him, she loved him, and she was sincere, she’d opened herself to him, to be wounded, as he wasn’t opening himself to her. So, she was the naive one, in her heart she was the younger of the two of them. The strange thing was, she hadn’t actually thought much about Woody Clark in years. Not that she’d repudiated him but that, the way she shoved older clothes back into the corners of her walk-in closets, to make way for newer clothes, not a cyclical but a chronological progression, and the older clothes faded from memory as from sight, so she’d ceased thinking urgent thoughts about Woody. There’d been an actor on Seinfeld who resembled Woody to a degree. And sometimes in public she’d find herself watching a tall burly crew cut guy, ex-athlete beginning to go to fat, one of the baby-face bandits as she and her women friends called them: guys that, well into their forties and fifties, and, who knows, into their sixties and beyond, could get away with every kind of bullshit because they had baby faces and you had to love them.

  Yvonne said, in a suddenly husky, choked voice, “I think of you all the time, Woody. I just want to tell you.” If the lie came so easily, maybe it wasn’t a lie? “And I don’t mean sexual, Woody. Not just that.”

  Pinched-glowering, yet Woody managed to laugh.

  “‘Not just that’? I doubt it, honey. There isn’t all that much outside sex. I mean, to take seriously.”

  “Well, maybe. But it’s more than that, for me.” Yvonne spoke vehemently. She gave his chest a thump with her fist, as if to push him away. “I miss you, I mean as an individual. As a unique person. You’re the only man practically to make me laugh.” Yvonne was so serious now, she had to speak lightly. Her eyes were welling with ridiculous tears.

  “You miss my dick. Good old good old. Reliable.” Woody made a snorting noise. “Or anyway, mostly.”

  “Stop talking like an asshole, Woody, when you’re not. It’s like calling yourself a slob when you’re not. What you have is style, a natural kind of style. If you wear slovenly old clothes, rotting old shoes, if your jaws are covered in stubble, it doesn’t matter because you’re you. While other men, no matter what they wear, what car they drive, how their hair is styled, it’s irrelevant. You must know that, God damn. I hate it when you put yourself down.”

  Suddenly she was hurt, sulky. He hadn’t moved a step backward when she’d thumped his chest. Now she pushed at his stomach that was perceptibly harder than she’d expected: he must be doing some kind of stomach exercises, from a prone position. His upper arms were thick as hams. And his neck!—she couldn’t have closed her two hands around it, even if she’d wanted to strangle him. The primitive part of her female brain was impressed but the rest was pissed by the dumb-dead weight, the obdurate bulk of the guy. And him protesting, “‘Put myself down’? Like, you’re saying it’s some kind of suicide? When I’m trying to be up front, honest? To you it’s ‘talking like an asshole’? That’s what it is, to you?”

  Woody was pretending to be hurt. Woody was wanting Yvonne to remember how, when she’d lost it and screamed at him, really screamed at him those several times, like a crazed woman, stammering and choking and spitting out the most vicious words, he’d never lost control and insulted her. The most agitated he’d been, he’d stammered red-faced, “You—you better stop! You better not say anything more!” He’d let her burn herself out, like a flash fire. Somehow, even at such times, as if knowing he’d provoked her, Woody had been on her side.

  That was the remarkable thing about Woody Clark, Yvonne was remembering now. Essentially, unlike anybody else she knew, Woody had been on her side.

  She was saying, “It’s just, I do miss you. I wouldn’t be crazy, the way I was. I wouldn’t be, you know, jealous.” Here was a sudden swerve into the subjunctive. Wouldn’t. Would. No wonder Woody Clark was suddenly very still. A damp stain like wings, if you could have wings on your chest, had materialized on the front of Woody’s T-shirt, Yvonne was tracing with her fingers.

  “It wasn’t good, Vonnie. You know that. Not just for you, it made you into somebody you basically aren’t, but for me, too. I hated what I, well—was responsible for.”

  Vonnie! She wasn’t hearing what Woody was saying but she heard Vonnie which meant their old intimacy. When they were naked together, vulnerable. Vonnie meant a time when they would never, never hurt each other.

  “I know! But I could change. I mean, I have changed. I’m older—I’m not so emotional. I wouldn’t be so frantic about you, Woody. So—watchful.” Christ she was hearing herself sound like a defense attorney pleading a cause in which he wants you to believe he believes.

  “But—see, honey—we don’t love each other, now. We don’t actually know each other, do we? We’re different people. I know I am.” Woody was pleading, too. Not exactly pushing Yvonne back but holding her at bay, palms of his meaty hands against her shoulders while she was clutching at his forearms.

  “I could love you, Woody. I never stopped, it just went underground. You know that, come on.”

  “Fuck this, Vonnie. This is bullshit.”

  “I’m serious! You know I am.”

  She’d begun to cry. The tears were spontaneous, hot as acid. Did this mean they were sincere? The way she was feeling, a sensation like a rag being twisted inside her chest, and something inky running down her face, she felt sincere, like the outermost layer of her skin was being peeled off, but Woody was being weird and not-himself repeating it hadn’t been good, it hadn’t been any kind of life for either of them, and there was Yvonne’s husband Neil, and her daughter, and Yvonne interrupted saying he wasn’t listening! wasn’t hearing her!—“I’ve just been explaining, Woody, I would not be so crazy now. I’ve been telling you and you don’t hear.” Her voice was lifting dangerously. But why did Woody provoke her! “I think I panicked, then. I had to get out. I was going to pieces, and Neil was close to finding out, and you know Neil, I mean you knew Neil, he isn’t like us, he isn’t the kind to forgive. So he was ready to leave Mount Olive, things were falling into place for him, a transfer, a new job, he’s fine, we’re like people digging in different parts of a garden, we’re in the garden together but, you know, not together. Not like you and me. I mean, maybe Neil did know something, the way Caroline knew something, without exactly knowing what it was”—speaking quickly now not wanting to see in Woody’s face how he was feeling about this, that possibly Caroline had known more than she, Yvonne, had wished to believe she’d known—“but it was me, my fault, I understood even then but I couldn’t seem to stop it, I had a hard time not being with you all the time, Woody. I never saw you sleep, for Christ’s sake.” There came the note of reproach, the old indignation, something prim and punitive like a glass struck at a banquet, the heart sinks to hear a glass struck at a banquet meaning toasts, speeches, soul-killing and tedious, and so practically in mid-syllable Yvonne quick-changed her tone, before (she hoped!) Woody could register it, like recognizing an old melody in some scrambled jazz improvisation. She said, lowering her voice, “There were things I stopped, after you, sweetie. I mean, forever. Smoking dope, and drinking vodka, and masturbating. After you.”

  Woody blinked and stared. Woody decided to laugh, this was meant to be funny was it? “You’re kidding, right? You aren’t serious.”

  “I am! I am serious.”

  For it was true. Dope, vodka, masturbating. All that was tied up with Woody Clark for no one else in Mount Olive had s
moked dope with her except Woody, no one else in Mount Olive had offered her dope except Woody, and the vodka had been some kind of flashy fad, Dostoyevskian-dangerous to one like Yvonne with dipsomaniac genes and in fact she’d had a little problem with that, with the drinking, after moving across the state from Mount Olive, but she didn’t intend to tell Woody Clark that. And the masturbating: not exactly something she was proud of but why not tell Woody, spill her guts to Woody as she hadn’t been able to spill her guts to any therapist, ever. The masturbation was something she’d done compulsively, fierce and insatiable and (maybe) slightly deranged, after afternoons with Woody when she’d had to fantasize the man back with her and so vividly she could not cease thinking of him, seeing him, smelling his sweet-funky sexy-sweaty odor, feeling him inside her, and out; and to call such frantic sexual need pleasure, pleasurable let alone self-pleasuring was some kind of crude joke. Seeming to see from a distance of about ten feet a woman screaming and tearing at a pillow cover with her teeth, moaning, sobbing as if her heart was being broken, her desperate fingers inadequate trying to contain the muscular convulsions between her chafed legs, and there was a mad wish to pry up inside herself with, what?—a knife-blade, a pair of scissors. Those months she’d been in a fever, this had been sickness, and trying then to sleepwalk through her life as a man’s wife and a (needy) girl’s mother with dilated eyes, swollen mouth and thoroughly fucked-up head—she had no idea how she’d managed, it was a wonder to her like sending a man to Mars, or wherever. No possible way you could comprehend it except to assume it had happened, somehow.

  Flush-faced Woody was saying, “Ohhhh fuck. Just fuck, Yvonne.

  Why’d you tell me this shit?” and Yvonne was saying, wiping at her eyes, speaking eagerly now, “Because, well—I thought we told each other everything.” And Woody was saying, “Everything? We told each other nothing” and Yvonne was saying, “We did? I mean—we didn’t? I mean, I did—” and Woody was saying, in the voice of an aggrieved twelve-year-old, “Here I thought we were so terrific together. We were fantastic, I thought. You were so classy-cool and ice-blond not what anybody’d think from seeing you which was a terrific turn-on, for me I mean, you were always, like, ‘I’ll try anything,’ like I was some kind of native safari guide, leading the white lady into the jungle. And now you’re telling me, you’re actually telling me that all that time you—” Woody shook his head as if to dislodge something inside it. He could not bring himself to enunciate just what it was, Yvonne had been doing.

  She protested, “But that’s why, Woody. I was crazy for you. I couldn’t get enough of the actual you. It’s the way women are, I think. I mean, when it’s like a sickness. When love is, well—like a sickness. The fantasy.”

  “What fantasy? I was there, wasn’t I real? I thought I was plenty real.”

  How to make Woody, or any man, know, the more real he is in actual life, the more real in fantasy? Yvonne began to stammer, “But you, you must have fantasies, too? Don’t men? I mean, sometimes? Come on, Woody, you must have masturbated, too—”

  Woody said, appalled, “No! Why’d I do that! I wasn’t thirteen for Christ’s sake. This is really sick, Yvonne. This is so you. Telling me now, eight years later like a delayed kick in the groin.”

  Yvonne laughed. Woody was so hot-eyed and excited, the blond fuzz covering his flushed scalp looked radioactive. You’d have thought she had insulted his lineage, his dignity. “Oh, Woody. Come on. I’m only just telling you how it was with me, it’s a compliment to you. How many female residents of Mount Olive, all ages, are fantasizing about Woody Clark any given time of the day, or night? Live with it.”

  Woody was sulky-mouthed, skeptical. “I suppose now you’re going to tell me, jacking-off was better.” Better than what, Woody left unsaid.

  Yvonne said, hurt, “‘Jacking-off’ isn’t what women do. With women it isn’t so crude, it’s more fantasy, romantic. I mean, it isn’t all that physical.” Yvonne paused, not knowing what she meant. For certainly it had been physical. And yes, often it had been better than the seemingly real thing, with the man. She began to laugh, a little short of breath. The courthouse was nominally air-conditioned, but you’d hardly have known it in this submerged corridor that smelled like the interior of an old refrigerator.

  Woody said, frowning, “Baby, cut the bullshit. You’re breaking my heart. My balls, you’re breaking. Was it better? ‘Mas-tur-bating’ some secret place where Neil wouldn’t be likely to find you?”

  Yvonne laughed. Ohhh no she wouldn’t say one word more on the subject. Almost, she’d think that she and Woody had been smoking dope in the basement of the old courthouse, he’d been passing her one of his “fantastic” joints (he’d acquired, he said, from the same high school dropout kid who supplied the local teenagers) and laughing at the dazed-silly expression on her face, hilarious when she coughed, choked, wheezed and couldn’t seem to keep her mouth closed.

  There were footsteps at the farther end of the corridor, on the stairs. Someone else was coming to the county clerk’s office? A man in what appeared to be a rumpled seersucker suit, looking like a courthouse lawyer. Thank God, no one Yvonne recognized. He bypassed the clerk’s door to unlock another door, and disappeared inside.

  During this exchange, Woody had been looming over Yvonne. She remembered with a thrill his air of menace, the way sometimes he’d use his big body aggressively, in the guise of seeming-playful so you’d think He’s kidding, but this is the real thing. In their circle, Woody Clark’s reputation was up-from-blue-collar, therefore frank-talking, cut-through-bullshit, straight-Democratic ticket, though in fact (not that Woody would talk about this, much) his father ran a family-owned business, Woody had gone to one of the small, good colleges in New York State (maybe Colgate? Hamilton?), had a business degree from Cornell and was a partner in Mount Olive’s preeminent accounting firm. “Let’s get some fresh air, Yvonne. It’s badly needed.” He’d been herding her in the direction of a rear door marked EXIT.

  Unexpected bright air! After the dim-lit corridor, it felt like TV exposure.

  The asphalt lot was shimmering with heat. A surprising number of vehicles were parked there. Woody inquired which car was Yvonne’s and she explained she’d parked on the street, her car was a metallic-green Acura; Woody pointed out his massive black Land Rover, parked close by in a way to take up two spaces. Yvonne said, “Why am I not surprised, Woody? The Land Rover was invented for guys like you.”

  Woody took this as a compliment. He offered her a cigarette, some low-tar filter brand Yvonne didn’t even recognize, and she declined, though with regret. (Yes she’d stopped smoking. Was trying to. Like the personal trainer, the Atkins diet. Other things that made the navigation of a single day like a voyage in a kayak in white-water rapids.) Woody was talking about cars, or maybe he was talking about the economy, looking over her head now restless-eyed, smoking his cigarette with zest. It was sharp as pain, how badly Yvonne wanted to ask about Caroline, or anyway who’d just recently died in Woody’s family, for surely it had to be family, to upset Woody the way it had seemed to upset him, unless she was misreading him but no: she was sure she’d read Woody just right, a few minutes ago. But she couldn’t ask, and he wasn’t going to volunteer, though Woody was asking, circumspectly, politely, about Neil, Neil’s work, for he’d heard Neil was “doing really well” and, you could see that Woody sincerely meant it, he was “happy” for them both.

  He said, sucking in smoke, “Everybody always said, Neil wouldn’t stay in Mount Olive long. That seemed evident.”

  Yvonne took this as a compliment, and not a backhanded one. She’d been wiping at her smudged mascara with a tissue, trying not to be too obvious. In the acid-bright air her eyes ached but she didn’t want to retrieve her sunglasses from her handbag, the lenses were so dark-tinted as to seem opaque. She wanted to see Woody Clark clearly, and she wanted him to see her clearly. She heard herself say, in a casual, seemingly retrospective voice, not at all an accusing voice but soft-soundin
g as she could manage, “I really did want you to know, Woody: I think of you often. You were the love of my life.” She paused. Her mouth twitched. Each was waiting for some further remark, a comic one-liner perhaps. But Yvonne couldn’t think of anything funny enough to risk.

  (Oh, they’d joked so much together! Yvonne was remembering that now. Every assignation was a conversation and every conversation was packed with laughs. Her laughter with Woody Clark had been like hyperventilating: once you start, it’s hard to stop.)

  Woody said, exhaling smoke like punctuation, “Bullshit! You haven’t thought of me in years. Why’d you think of me?” It was a sincere question, Woody meant it. “You have your family. You have your ‘corporate attorney’ husband and your ‘Tudor mansion’—yeah, I heard about that—and your ‘social life’ in—wherever.”

  “Averill Park.”

  “Upscale suburb of Albany? I’ve heard.”

  Yvonne smiled. She was embarrassed, just slightly, but she liked it that Woody had heard. Meaning he’d been asking after her, maybe. Or that, hearing of the departed Wertenbakers, Yvonne and Neil, mutual friends naturally passed on the word to Woody Clark as if, in retrospect, their secret liaison hadn’t been so secret after all but a matter of public record like the Police Blotter column in the Mount Olive Weekly.

  Yvonne said carelessly, “‘Social life’ is a hobby. It’s for spare time. It isn’t, you know, real.” Though she recalled how Woody had loved parties, Woody Clark glowing and glistening and loud-laughing so people were drawn to him, how people awaited Woody’s arrival, how a light seemed to go out if Woody Clark had to leave early. “Neil and I, when we go out, don’t even talk together, it’s like we just arrive together then drift away. Some parties, they’re just blurs to me. I feel like some kind of amateur porn actress, smiling and smiling, so-happy smiling, Neil Wertenbaker’s wife, and the sad thing is, if Neil and I just met at one of these parties, for instance seated next to each other at dinner, we wouldn’t be drawn together, at all. One time we were, I guess. But that time is past. Now we’re like”—Yvonne was becoming vague now—“opposite ends of a magnet? That repel.”