American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  His questions so often strike her as riddles: Zen koans of a kind; though, in Ian’s case, the questioner does not know the answer, and asks, it sometimes seems, in order to know. Yet there are no answers to such questions; that Glynnis knows.

  She loves him; even in, sometimes, disliking him, raging at him, she loves him; for he seems to inhabit her, like an indwelling spirit that is both other and herself: a twin. If, over the stretch of their long marriage, Glynnis has been, now and then, unfaithful to Ian, she has rarely been unfaithful to him in the more spacious sense of the word; she has never loved another man as she loves him. Indeed, planning this birthday celebration and preparing, with such anticipation, the food, Glynnis feels her heart swell with love of him, and gratitude for him, that he is the source of so much happiness: a bounty of feeling that spills over onto their friends as well, for without friendship, without a circle of close friends, there can be no true celebration.

  It is four-thirty. The delivery from the wine and liquor store arrives, and from the florist; Marvis finishes with her vacuuming, and she and Glynnis tug at the dining room table and pry the halves apart, after some effort (Ian evidently locked the table, without telling Glynnis, when they’d put it together last), and fit the extra leaf into place, and begin setting the table. Midway, Glynnis breaks off, to return to the kitchen, to the chicken and the farce à quenelles à la panade: working, as the afternoon wanes, in a bliss of concentration. For fifteen people Glynnis must in fact prepare three ballotines; going through the motions, dreamy yet deft, of sewing, rolling in waxed paper, then in a kitchen towel. Her fingers move with their own practiced intelligence; her skin warms as if lit from within; her eyes grow misty. Why is it Ian has never understood? Why does he imagine his world, because it is an abstract world, is naturally superior to hers, because it is physical, tactile . . . because it is food?

  Glynnis moves from counter to stove to butcher-block table, from table to counter, counter to refrigerator, refrigerator to sink, sink to table to counter, counter to stove, stove to sink to refrigerator to counter to table, humming to herself, deeply absorbed, unthinking. From time to time she catches sight of her reflection in one of the kitchen’s shiny surfaces; she likes best the floating, very nearly iconic face at eye level in the coppery undersides of her pans. This face is both Glynnis McCullough’s and that of an unknown woman; it reveals none of the small blemishes of middle age, the fine white lines bracketing eyes and mouth, the tiny dents, tucks, creases in the skin, the soft crepey look beneath the eyes, that ordinarily distress her. Glynnis is a beautiful woman still, she supposes; but, after all, she is forty-eight years old, and how much longer can beauty reasonably last? In her kitchen, however, where no true mirrors are allowed, reflecting surfaces are benign. Even Glynnis’s hair, silver-streaked since girlhood, flames up a rich lustrous russet-red in this room.

  Glynnis loves, too, her kitchen library: the shelf of cookbooks and food books. Many of their pages are torn and stained, the recipes annotated, modified: “corrected.” In some margins there are stars, in others question marks, or exclamation points, or those curse symbols unique to cartoons. Leafing idly through certain of these books is like leafing through old diaries; the other evening, half seriously, she’d told Ian that, when they were both old, really old, elderly, they might read these entries aloud to each other; and certain meals, certain days in their lives and evenings with friends, entire pockets of lost time, might be returned to them: as in Proust. “Won’t that be lovely?” Glynnis asked, struck by the notion; and Ian smiled, and ran a hand through his hair, and regarded her for so long in silence that Glynnis thought he must not have heard her question. Then he said, “Yes. It will. Lovely.”

  At five-twenty, when the table is nearly set and Glynnis is about to break off work and take a long restful restorative bath, the doorbell rings again; and it is another, and unexpected, floral delivery. This one, a half dozen pink rosebuds, filled out with those delicate lacy pale flowers—or are they in fact leaves that resemble flowers?—that florists use to such advantage, is unsigned, mysteriously unsigned: merely a small birthday card and the inscription Happiness to both, in what is very likely a florist’s assistant’s hand. Glynnis smiles, delighted as a child; puts the flowers in one of her cut-glass Waterford vases, inherited from her grandmother, thinking, Our celebration has begun.

  2.

  They were undressing for bed, one blowsy March night, when Ian said suddenly, in that way he had, though, since coming to Hazelton-on-Hudson, he spoke in this way less frequently, “Do you feel, Glynnis, that you have a soul?” Glynnis said quizzically, “Do I feel that I have a—?” “You know: a soul,” Ian said. His smile was faint, and wistful; an expression in his face that Glynnis could not have named, except that it was so uniquely her husband’s: a boyish look of sobriety and doubt, on the edge of anxiety; yet there was a readiness too to smile, and make a joke of it, if his mood was not matched by hers. (For, like all the men of Glynnis’s acquaintance, like all Hazelton men, in any case, Ian most dreaded seeming naïve, or foolish: being made a fool.) He’d come to an absentminded stop in buttoning the shirt of his flannel pajamas; he had taken off his glasses, and his eyes looked inordinately round and exposed.

  Glynnis slipped into bed; propped herself up against her pillows, arms behind her head; considered the question seriously, instead of making light of it, or outrightly mocking it, as she might, in other circumstances, have done. Do I have a soul? She said, after a moment, “I suppose I do.”

  “You have a soul?”

  Glynnis smiled; and frowned; made an effort not to be annoyed by this old habit of Ian’s, more pronounced in recent weeks, of repeating questions verbatim which had seemingly been answered. “I don’t know,” she said. “Do I? Is this a quiz, or a catechism?”

  “You ‘have’ a soul?”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve asked me?”

  Ian spoke slowly and gravely, as if transcribing his own words.

  “And your soul, you feel, is somehow distinct from you?”

  “Distinct from me?”

  “You say that you ‘have’ a soul, and you seem to be quite certain. But that means that the soul is something other than you, since you ‘have’ it. The way you have a foot, or a certain shade of hair, I mean. An object to your subject.”

  Glynnis saw in which direction Ian was headed, and laughed, and sighed; for really, if they were going to talk instead of sleeping, there were any number of practical things about which they might talk—household repairs, the problem of Bianca, a conflict of dates and appointments the following afternoon. She said, with an air of thoughtfulness, “It really couldn’t be, could it?—I mean, distinct from me. I mean, if it is me. I’m sure you’re right.”

  “What do you mean, ‘right’?” Ian said, startled. “In what way am I ‘right’?”

  “That I can’t have a soul distinct from me, if it is also me.”

  “Yet you speak of the phenomenon as ‘it.’ As something that must be distinct from you.”

  “Maybe it’s a bad habit, a linguistic habit. Aren’t questions like these—”

  “Then do you think you might be a soul?—as distinct from ‘having’ one?”

  Glynnis laid a forearm over her eyes, shielding them from the bedside lamp. For all her sense of herself as a person of nearboundless energy, the envy of her friends, she felt, many nights, very tired; tiredness, sheer physical tiredness, pulsed from her knees, ankles, feet. “Oh Ian, could we talk about this another time? Haven’t we talked about it already? It’s nearly one in the morning,” she said, disliking both the practicality of her tone and its familiarity, “and we’ll be getting up at seven. We have to figure out what to do about tomorrow. If the Honda is going to be serviced first thing in the morning, and if you want to drive to—”

  “Just tell me, please,” Ian said, with a peculiar sort of urgency. “It’s important to me to know what you think.”

  “But that isn’t what you asked a minute
ago.”

  “What?”

  Glynnis took pleasure of her own in such needle-sharp rebuttals. “You asked what did I feel.”

  “Of course. Of course I did. Yes, I want to know, not what you think, but what you feel.”

  “I feel . . .” But suddenly, with, almost, a stab of fear, she did not know what she felt; or even, with Ian standing there, staring toward her, so unnervingly intense, what she thought. She said, less patiently, “Oh, Christ, honey, I’m perfectly happy to be a soul or to have a soul; whatever suits you.”

  Ian said, hurt, “You really do think me a fool, don’t you.”

  “Of course I don’t. I love you.”

  “Is that a refutation?”

  “A what?”

  She saw he was smiling at her, trying too to joke, even clowning a bit, mugging. He rubbed his head with both hands energetically, like a cartoon character. “At least, if one is neither a soul nor possesses a soul,” he said, “one can’t lose his soul. That’s a cheerful proposition.”

  “Come to bed,” Glynnis, laughing. “Make love.”

  “Which would prove—?”

  “Disprove.”

  Though Glynnis hadn’t been serious—the hour was alarmingly late; she and Ian were both very tired, and were, in any case, no longer in the habit of making love with much frequency, and never at such odd, impromptu times—she began to feel, as Ian approached, a warm dark pool of desire, rather blurred, amorphous, both desire and the memory of desire, pulsing in her loins; and felt a moment’s anguish, as at a loss undiscovered until now.

  Ian said practically, as he slipped into bed, cool-limbed, coltish, always taking up more room than Glynnis anticipated, “It’s too late for love.”

  IN HER BATH, Glynnis recalls that night; and other nights, since then, when Ian has behaved not oddly, or even disagreeably, but not as “himself”; even when making love, or attempting love, with her. At such times his thoughts are clearly elsewhere, careening and darting and plunging: elsewhere. Glynnis thinks, He doesn’t love me in the old way. She thinks, hurt, angry, baffled, yet hopeful, Things will be better in a few months. (A political situation is brewing at the Institute: Dr. Kreizer will be retiring in the fall of 1988, and his successor must be named within the next six months. Though Ian has not cared to talk about it, Glynnis knows, from Denis, that Ian is Max’s favored choice to take over the directorship. And Ian does not know, is in an anguish of not knowing, if he wants the honor, and the work, and the responsibility; or if, in fact, he wants to cut back on his professional commitments, with the hope of taking a year off fairly soon and working on an old project of his—political theory? historical theory?—set aside when the McCulloughs moved from Cambridge to Hazelton.)

  Now that Bianca is away at college and Glynnis and Ian are alone together, for the first time in nineteen years, it seems to Glynnis that their relations are more tentative: at times more romantic, yet nervously so, as if something were not quite settled between them. There is relief, certainly, in Bianca’s absence, since the strain between mother and daughter has been, these past two or three years, considerable, yet not the kind of relief Glynnis might have anticipated. If, for instance, she touches Ian, in affection or playfully, he is slow to respond: and then responds as if by rote. In sleep, he no longer responds at all, as if sleep were a counterworld, into which he disappears, and Glynnis cannot follow.

  She thinks, How far he has come since that morning in Ann Arbor. In the cafeteria, stricken by nosebleed.

  Stricken. Helpless.

  He misses Bianca, of course; misses that other, if unpredictable, corner of their triangle. Misses, in Bianca, a part of his youth. (As Glynnis understands she does too; it’s pointless not to acknowledge the fact.) When Glynnis telephoned Bianca at Wesleyan, to tell her about the birthday celebration and to invite her, Bianca had been guarded at first, as if suspecting that Glynnis wanted something from her, or of her; then she became enthusiastic, almost excessively so, as if the idea had been her own. “Of course I want to be included,” she said. “It isn’t every day Daddy has his fiftieth birthday.” During their ten-minute conversation Bianca returned to the subject of Ian’s age several times, as if the fact were a surprise to her; as if, like those countless statistical facts with which her father conjured in his demographic studies, it had to be interpreted in a social and not merely a personal context. “Well, fifty isn’t really old any longer, is it?” Bianca said. Then, “For a man, I mean.”

  You little bitch, Glynnis thought.

  But said, only, laughing, “Honey, it isn’t old at all.”

  It is in her bath, conscious of her breasts buoyant and warmly lifting, as if caressed from beneath, that Glynnis is likely to recall her pregnancy, her pregnancies: thinking, rather unfairly, of Bianca as she is now in terms of Bianca as she’d been before her actual birth . . . those many hours, those terrible hours, of labor. How true it is: bringing forth a child is labor; bringing forth that child was labor! Glynnis had worked to give birth to Bianca, and Bianca, it seemed, had resisted, as if not wanting to be born; one body, pain-racked, had expelled another body from it, in order that both might live. We have never quite forgiven each other, Glynnis thinks.

  Though in fact Glynnis has forgotten the pain, mostly. As she has forgotten, except as a minor stab of a loss, Bianca’s infant brother, to be named Jonathan, who died aged three days. It is a few minutes after six. Glynnis dresses with care, regarding herself critically in the largest of the bedroom mirrors; feels an urge, quickly suppressed, to get herself a glass of wine and sip from it as she dresses, a habit of some years ago. (When the affair with Denis—begun, really, as play, quite innocent play, on Glynnis’s part—became something rather more serious than either had intended.) Like most extremely attractive women, at least during the period of their lives when their attractiveness is incontestable, Glynnis has always enjoyed dressing for special occasions: takes delight in making herself up, fashioning her hair, painting her nails, wearing jewelry, perfume. There is something about the ritual that is reassuring, Glynnis thinks, though with the passage of time one will not want to look too closely in the mirror.

  She has chosen a chiffon dress, not new but allegedly Ian’s favorite: a soft, romantic apricot shade, with numerous narrow rippling pleats and a low-cut beaded neckline, that shows her breasts to advantage. Her shoulders and arms too are partly exposed; bare, and rosy from the bath, they suggest the boneless yet resilient flesh of a woman in a Renoir painting. She stares at herself as if hypnotized. Is this the person, the face and body, others see? But who is it, they see?

  The telephone begins ringing. She hears Marvis answer it, in a distant room.

  3.

  And the celebration, so long anticipated, cannot be more successful: at the outset, at least.

  Ian, with Bianca, arrives home just after seven-thirty; and it is immediately evident, from their faces, that Bianca has told him nothing, and that Ian—ah, Ian!—suspects nothing. He hangs his trench coat in the closet, retires briefly to his bathroom, and, when he emerges, having washed his face and combed his hair, Glynnis, under the pretext of serving him a before-dinner drink, leads him back to the semidarkened room where their friends are waiting, as easily, she will say afterward, as a lamb is led to slaughter. How could he follow her so trustingly? so unquestioningly? Hadn’t he noticed her chiffon dress beneath the apron? Her hair, her perfume? The pearls around her neck, the pearls screwed into her earlobes?

  But no: he is taken totally by surprise. Happy birthday, Ian! Congratulations, Ian! He is moved, quite deeply moved, by his friends’ greetings: their handshakes, embraces, kisses; the warmth and obvious love they feel for him. And Bianca, who throws her arms extravagantly around his neck: Happy birthday, Daddy! For a minute or two Glynnis sees that he is rather disoriented: adjusting his glasses, smiling, blinking, peering at faces, looking around, as if for someone not there. (But surely Glynnis has invited their closest dearest friends? Is there someone Ian would have ad
ded?) One of the men fixes a drink for him, and Malcolm Oliver takes a series of quick flashing shots with his Polaroid camera, and Glynnis links her arm through his and leads him into a quieter corner of the room and says, “Ian? You aren’t angry with me, are you? Is it too much of a surprise?”

  Ian kisses her, and says, “Of course not; why would I be angry with you? I’m delighted. I am absolutely delighted. It is worth it, almost, after all, to be fifty years old in America.”

  BUT NO ONE will acknowledge the pink roses.

  Glynnis makes inquiries; Glynnis is curious and perplexed and, of course, flattered—for the anonymous sender was thoughtful enough to say Happiness to both—but no one will acknowledge the roses. The Kuhns had had delivered, that afternoon, a rather regal floral display, too large, in fact, for Glynnis to use as a centerpiece; and Glynnis herself had ordered flowers, as she always does for a party, when flowers from her own garden are not available; and Leonard Oppenheim and Paul Owen brought, in hand, an assortment of red roses and carnations. “But who sent us these?” Glynnis asks, holding the cut-glass vase aloft. “Who is so sweet, and so teasing?”