Wild Nights!

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It was the wife’s childish reasoning that Emily wouldn’t miss one of the paper scraps, or would think that she’d simply lost it. The wife would keep the scrap that looked as if it had the most words scribbled on it. As she replaced the other scraps in the apron pocket, she realized what she was feeling on her cheek as she leaned near the poet: the other woman’s warm breath.

  Panicked, she stumbled back. Collided with a chair. Oh!

  In her agitation the wife yet managed to back away from the stiff figure arrested in the act of potato paring, and in the doorway of the kitchen paused to click the remote control activate—for she must not leave Emily in sleep mode, to be discovered by the husband. There came the reassuring click! like the sound of a television set being switched on, as the wife fled the scene.

  Why am—I—

  Where am—I—

  When am—I—

  And—You?—

  A poem! A poem by Emily Dickinson! Handwritten in the poet’s small neat schoolgirl hand that was perfectly legible, if you peered closely. Eagerly the wife consulted the Collected Poems, and saw that this was an entirely original poem that could only have been written in the Krim household, in Golders Green.

  Her mistake was, to show it to the husband.

  “A riddle, is it? I don’t like riddles.”

  The husband frowned, holding the paper scrap to the light and squinting through his bifocal glasses. These were relatively new glasses, only a few months old, the husband seemed to resent having to wear for he wasn’t yet old.

  The wife protested, “It’s poetry, Harold. Emily Dickinson has written this poem, an entirely new ‘Dickinson’ poem, in our house.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Madelyn: this isn’t poetry. It’s some sort of computer printout, words arranged like poetry to tease and to torment. I’ve told you, I don’t like riddles.”

  The husband looked as if he might tear the dear little scrap of paper into pieces. Quickly the wife took it from him.

  She would hide it away among her most treasured things. Imagining that one day, when she and Emily were truly close as sister-poets, she would show it to Emily, they would laugh together over the “pocket-picking,” and Emily would sign the little poem For dear Maddie.

  “I hate riddles, and I hate her.”

  For the husband, too, had come to thinking of EDickinsonRepliLuxe as her, and not it.

  A torment and a tease the female poet had come to be, in the husband’s imagination. As soon as he entered the house, which had always been a refuge for him, a place of comfort at the end of his fifty-minute commuter journey from Rector Street in lower Manhattan, he was nervously aware of the ghostly-gliding presence hovering at the edge of his vision, rarely coming into focus for him, that his wife fondly called “Emily.” It had been promised by RepliLuxe, Inc. that bringing a RepliLuxe figure into one’s household would enrich, enhance, “double in value” one’s life, but for the husband, this had certainly not been the case. His exchanges with “Emily” were stiff and formal: “Why, Miss Dickinson—I mean, Emily—how are you this evening?” Or, at the wife’s suggestion: “Emily, would you care to join us for a few minutes, at dinner? We see so little of you.” (Of course the husband knew that, lacking a gastrointestinal system, Emily could not “dine” with them. But he knew that Emily sometimes joined the wife for tea, and some sort of conversation.) (What did they talk about? The wife was evasive.) Several times the husband glimpsed the poet’s ghostly figure outside his study door as he sat at his desk but when he turned, she vanished like a startled fawn. He and Mrs. Krim, watching television in the family room, had more than once become aware of the poet hovering in the corridor outside, but she’d shrunk away at once when they called to her, with a look of dismay and disdain. (For how bizarre, how vulgar, television images must seem to a sheltered young woman of the 1860s, darting across a glassy screen like frantic fish!) Nor could the poet be tempted to read the New York Times, though the husband had once come upon her staring with appalled fascination at a lurid color-photograph on the front page of the paper, of corpses strewn about like discarded clothing in the aftermath of a bloody bomb explosion in the Middle East. “Why, Emily: you can have the paper to read, if you wish,” the husband said, but Emily shrank from him, as from the hefty newspaper, murmuring, “Master thank you but I think—no—” in a curious uninflected voice.

  Master! The husband had yet to become accustomed to the poet’s quaint manner of speech, that both nettled and intrigued.

  Oh but it was ridiculous to speak to a computerized mannikin—wasn’t it? The husband would have been very embarrassed, to be seen by his corporate associates down at 33 Rector Street, lower Manhattan. Yet he found himself staring after fey slender “Emily” who was so much smaller than Mrs. Krim, seemingly so much younger, no sooner materializing in his presence like a wraith than she vanished leaving behind a faint fragrance of—was it lilac?

  A chemical-based lilac. Yet seductive.

  “‘Emily.’”

  The poet’s room his wife had so obsessively furnished for their houseguest, the husband had not once entered since her arrival. Outside the (shut) door of that room in the upstairs corridor the husband stood very still. Thinking This is my house, and this is my room. If I wish, I have the right. But he did not move except to lean his head toward the door. Dared to press his ear against the door, that felt strangely warm, pulsing with the heat of his own secret blood.

  Inside, a sound of muffled sobs.

  The husband drew back, shocked. A mannikin could not sob—could it?

  It was June. Windows in the Krims’ five-bedroom English Tudor house at 27 Pheasant Lane, Golders Green, were opened to the warm sunny air. The poet began to appear more often downstairs. More often now, the poet wore white.

  A ghostly-glimmery white! A faded-ivory white, that looked like a bridal gown, smelling of must, mothballs, melancholy.

  The wife recognized this dress: the sole surviving white dress of Emily Dickinson. Except of course this dress had to be an imitation.

  The material appeared to be a fine cotton-muslin, with vertical puckers and pleats down the bodice, and a wide Puritan collar, and numerous cloth-covered buttons descending from the neck that must have required time to button. The sleeves were long and tight-fitting, the skirt brushed along the floor. If you couldn’t hear the poet’s gliding feet, you might hear the whisper of her skirt. “Emily, how nice you look. How…” But the wife hesitated to say pretty for pretty is such a weak trite word. Pretty might be wielded by the poet with razor-sharp acuity—She dealt her pretty words like Blades—but only if ironically meant. Nor did you think of this urgent, intense, quivering hummingbird of a woman as pretty.

  For the first time since her arrival out of the packing crate in April, Emily laughed. The whispery child-voice came low and thrilling: “And you dear Madelyn so very ‘nice’ too.” The wife’s fingers were squeezed by the poet’s quick-darting, surprisingly strong fingers, in the next instant gone.

  The wife was astonished: was Emily teasing her? Her?

  I hide myself within my flower

  That fading from your Vase,

  You, unsuspecting, feel for me—

  Almost a loneliness.

  The wife discovered this poem in the Collected Poems, written when the poet was thirty-four years old. Which might mean, Emily wouldn’t write it, in the Krim household, for another four years!

  In the lightness of summer, ghostly-whitely-clad, the poet surprised both the Krims by suddenly succumbing, one warm evening, to the wife’s repeated requests that she join her host and hostess at dinner “for just a few minutes”—“for a little conversation.” At last, the poet, quivering with shyness, was seated in the presence of the husband. “Why, Emily. Will you have a glass of…” The husband must have been so rattled by her appearance he forgot she lacked a gastrointestinal system!

  The wife chided him: “Harold! Really.”

  The poet slyly murmured: “Master no! I think no
t.”

  That day the poet had baked for the Krims one of her specialties: a very rich, very heavy chocolate cake, served with dollops of heavy cream. Nor could she eat a crumb of this delicious cake, of course.

  “Dear Emily! You’ve spoiled us with your wonderful meals, and this extraordinary ‘black bread’! But you are a poet,” the wife had rehearsed this little speech yet spoke awkwardly, seeing the poet’s candlelit face crinkle with displeasure, “—you are—and—and Harold and I are hopeful that—you will share a poem or two with us, tonight. Please!” But the poet seemed to shrink, crossing her thin arms across the narrow pleats of her glimmering-white bodice as if she were suddenly cold; for a moment, the wife worried that she would flee. To encourage her, the wife began to recite, “‘I hide myself within a flower—fading from a vase…You, seeing me, missing me?—feel lonely…’” The wife paused, her mind had gone blank. The husband, sipping wine, this tart red French wine he’d been drinking every evening lately, no matter the wife’s disapproving frowns, stared at the wife as if she’d begun to speak a foreign language: she seemed not to be speaking it well, but that she could speak it at all was astonishing. The poet, too, was staring at the wife, her shiny dark eyes riveted on the wife’s face.

  The wife was a solid fleshy woman. The wife was a woman who blushed easily so you would think, though you’d be mistaken, that the wife was easily intimidated, dissuaded. In fact, the wife was a stubborn woman. The wife had become a stubborn woman out of desperation and defiance. The wife began reciting, to Emily, ignoring the husband entirely, “‘Wild Nights—Wild Nights! Were I with thee—’”

  The poet’s lips moved. Almost inaudibly she murmured: “‘Wild Nights should be Our luxury!’”

  The husband laughed, uneasily. The husband refilled his wineglass, and drank. His moods, when he drank, were unpredictable even to him. He was angry about something, or he was very hurt about something, he couldn’t recall which. He brought his fist down hard on the table. The cherrywood dining room table large enough to accommodate ten guests, in whose smooth surface candle flames shimmered like dimly recalled dreams, that had never been struck by any fist, not once in nine, or nineteen, years. “I hate riddles. I hate ‘poems.’ I’m going to bed.”

  Clumsily the husband rose from the table. One of the candles teetered dangerously and would have fallen, except the wife deftly righted it in its silver holder. Neither the wife nor the poet dared move as the husband stalked out of the dining room, heavy-footed on the stairs. Deeply embarrassed, the wife said, “He commutes, you know. On the train. His work is numbers: taxes. His work is…”

  “…unfathomable!”

  Emily spoke slyly. Emily may even have laughed, as you could imagine a cat laughing. Rising quickly then from the table and like a wraith departing.

  In this summery season, the wife had begun writing poetry again. After a lull of nearly twenty years. Like her poet-companion in white, the wife wrote by hand. Like Emily, the wife sequestered herself in quiet, sun-filled spaces in the large house and wrote in a fever of concentration, until her hand cramped. Quickly and fluently the wife wrote, lost in a trance of incantatory words. She wrote of childhood memories, the joy of summer mornings, and the anguish of first love; the disappointment of marriage, and the sorrow of death, and life’s essential mystery. These poems the wife typed neatly onto her personalized stationery to present to her poet-companion, with trepidation.

  “Dear Emily! I hope you won’t mind…”

  The wife had surprised the poet, approaching her in a pensive mood at one of the sun-filled windows, a slender volume of verse by Emily Brontë on her lap. The dark-glassy eyes lifted warily, the thin fingers hid away what looked like lines of poetry, beneath the book. Emily was wearing the white pleated dress that gave her a ghostly, ethereal aura, and over this dress an apron; the wife noted that she’d unbuttoned several of the cloth-covered buttons, in the summer heat.

  Emily murmured what must have been a polite reply, and the wife gave the poems to her, and hovered close by, waiting as the poet read them in silence. The wife’s heart beat hard in apprehension, her lower lip trembled. How audacious Madelyn Krim was, to hand over her poems to the immortal Emily Dickinson! Yet, the gesture seemed altogether natural. Everything about EDickinsonRepliLuxe in the Krims’ household seemed altogether natural. In fact, the wife had ceased thinking of her poet-companion as EDickinsonRepliLuxe and when the husband referred to their distinguished houseguest in crude terms, not as her but as it, the wife turned a blank face to him, as if she hadn’t heard. The wife felt a small mean thrill of satisfaction that the poet so clearly preferred her to the husband; there was the unmistakable sisterly rapport between her and Emily, in opposition to the husband who was so obstinately male.

  At the window, Emily was sitting very still. As usual her posture was stiff, as if her backbone were made of an ungiving material like plastic. Her skin looked pale as paper, and as thin. Her hair was pulled back so tightly into a knot, it seemed that the corners of her eyes were being flattened. The wife saw, or seemed to see, an expression of bemused disdain pass over the poet’s face, as she glanced through the poems a second time, no sooner observed than it had vanished.

  Why, she’s laughing at me! My Emily!

  In her bright social voice meant to disguise all hurt the wife said, “Well, dear Emily: is my poetry—promising? Or—too obscure?”

  “Dear Mistress ‘the obscure’ is in the eye not the poem.”

  This enigmatic statement was uttered in a voice of careful neutrality yet the wife sensed, or seemed to sense, an underlying impatience, as if beneath Emily’s ladylike pose there was a being quivering with contempt for ordinary mortals. “Emily, I do wish you wouldn’t speak in riddles. You know that Harold finds it annoying, and so do I. Just tell me, please: are my poems any good? Do they seem to speak—truth?”

  The poet’s eyes lifted slowly, it seemed reluctantly, to the wife’s eyes now glaring with tears of indignation. “Dear Mistress! ‘Truth’ does not suffice except it be slant Truth is Lies.”

  “Oh! And what is that supposed to mean, I wonder.”

  Rudely the wife took back the sheaf of neatly typed poems from the poet’s hand, and stalked out of the room.

  “So, the veil of hypocrisy has been stripped away. ‘Dear Emily’ is not my sister after all.”

  The wife kept her hurt to herself, she would not confide in the husband. A heart lacerated with such small wounds, botched with scars like acne, she had too much pride to share with another person and certainly not with Mr. Krim who would invariably murmur Didn’t I warn you this was not a good idea!

  “‘Emily.’”

  A dozen times daily he spoke her name. Not in her hearing, and not in the wife’s hearing. He was exasperated with her, he was impatient with her, he resented her: “‘Emily.’” Yet the name had so melodic a sound, it could be uttered only tenderly.

  Oh but he hated this: his state of nerves.

  Hated her. For being made so intensely aware of her. The glimmering-white presence in his house he could not avoid seeing, if only in the corner of his eye.

  This house she’d come to haunt. His house.

  As EDickinsonRepliLuxe was his property.

  “I can ‘return’ her if I wish. I can ‘accelerate’ her and be rid of her. If I wish.”

  RepliLuxe models are copyright by RepliLuxe, Inc., and protected from all incursions, appropriations, and violations of United States copyright law. All RepliLuxe models are the private property of their purchasers and have no civil rights under the Constitution, nor any right to any attorney. RepliLuxe models are barred from seeking residences or “asylum” outside the private domicile of their duly designated purchasers. RepliLuxe models may not be resold. RepliLuxe models may be otherwise disposed of as the purchaser wishes whether returned to RepliLuxe, Inc. for warranty, as a down payment on a new model, to be re-tooled, or, if the edition has gone out of print, to be dismantled. RepliLuxe models may be destroy
ed.

  “She is my property. It is my property. Let the poetess scribble a coy little poem out of that.”

  Poetry! The scribbling disease.

  In the lowermost bureau drawer in their bedroom, beneath the wife’s lingerie, the husband discovered to his shock and disgust that the wife, too, had caught the scribbling disease.

  We outgrow love, like other things

  And put it in the Drawer—

  Till it an Antique fashion shows—

  Like Costumes Grandsires wore.

  The coolly disdainful sentiment, he knew, was EDickinsonRepliLuxe. But the naive handwriting was Mrs. Krim’s.

  A starry midnight. An autumnal chill to the air. Somehow, he was at her door. His door it was, technically speaking. He had not been drinking that evening. He hadn’t knocked on the door, possibly he’d pushed it open. They’d said of Harold Krim that he was middle-aged as a boy, which was cruel, and not-true. Now his hair was thinning and there seemed no direction in which to comb it that did not reveal a bumpy skull. His torso seemed to have slid some inches downward into his belly, yet his legs were thin and waxy-white and the once plentiful hairs seemed to be vanishing. The wire rims of his glasses seemed to have grown into his face, giving his eyes a startled stare. He was five feet nine inches tall, he towered over the poetess who roused him from his torpor of decades by murmuring Master and fixing him with eyes of girlish adoration.

  There came now the frightened cry: “Master!”

  He’d pushed inside the room. He’d had no choice but to shut the door firmly behind him for he did not wish Mrs. Krim to be disturbed, in her deep sedative sleep at the far end of the corridor. He was approaching the poet, hands lifted in entreaty. He could not have said why he was but partly dressed, why the thin lank strands of his hair were disheveled and beaded with perspiration. He believed that he wasn’t drunk yet his heart beat hard and sullen and the blood coursing through his veins was thick and dark as liquid tar, piping hot. Must’ve surprised the poet at her writing table. Where she’d been arranging, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, her damned scraps of paper. He meant to apologize for interrupting her but somehow he was too angry for apologies, or maybe it was too late for apologies. Midnight!