American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Glynnis called him “abstracted,” when she was in a mood to forgive, and “cold-blooded” when she was not.

  From time to time they had discussed the possibility of going to a marriage counselor, or to “some sort of therapist”—not in Hazelton where everyone knew everyone else but in New York City, of course; but the problem never seemed quite serious enough, really chronic enough, to warrant such desperate action. And they were both too busy. And they weren’t the kind of people who did such things: no one in their circle was. (With the notable exceptions of Leonard Oppenheim and Paul Owen, who had both undergone psychoanalysis, as young men; but then Leonard and Paul were gay and presumably less adjusted to the quotidian.) Glynnis’s pride would never have allowed her to spill her guts, as she inelegantly called it, to a stranger; and poor Ian would not have known the first thing to say. Should one apologize? Stammer out a sort of defense? Plead one’s own inviolate and evidently intransigent nature?

  What was new, mysteriously new, since, in fact, the night of Ian’s birthday party, was Glynnis’s emotional response, her so very emotional response; the startling and, Ian thought, wholly uncharacteristic bitterness she voiced, as if it were a bitterness long withheld out of charity to him. That was the surprise—the insult! For years the problem had come and gone, waxed and waned, held to its own unreadable cycles, a consequence of so many factors in their shared lives, such a snarl of domestic, social, and professional contingencies, it would have required the subtlety of a demographic study to diagnose causes, assign blame. Glynnis had been, most of the time, really quite sympathetic—Ian’s “abstractedness” had not yet shaded into “cold-bloodedness.” But now the hurt, the childish contorted face, the shifting of the eyes that held in them, so far as Ian could see, no love of him, not even pity of, or awareness of, him—these scenes, enacted for the most part in embarrassed silence, seemed, for no reason Ian could name (except the reason he could not name), to be worsening.

  On the very day following Ian’s birthday he and Glynnis had had a quarrel of an indeterminate sort, over a trifle, yet protracted for much of an evening; and quite spoiling that evening, which, with Bianca home, was supposed to have been rather special. And a few days later they clashed again, and quarreled again, over another trifle: their emotions flaring up, and raging, like a grass fire in a dry season.

  “I suppose it was a miscalculation,” Glynnis said; “a surprise party for you.” She spoke quietly, yet there was a mild emphasis on you that fell harshly on Ian’s ears.

  But he naturally protested, insisting that her party had been a great idea, and brilliantly executed; everyone had enjoyed it; he had enjoyed it; what more was there to say? “We certainly all look happy enough here,” he said, indicating the dozen or more Polaroid snapshots tacked on Glynnis’s bulletin board. “I look in fact transcendentally happy,” he said, though his lean narrow face, surprised in the camera’s glare, was bleached out and curiously distended, and his smile looked too emphatic to be genuine. “And look at you: radiant.”

  (For Glynnis, long practiced in being photographed, and naturally photogenic, seemed to know how precisely to smile for a camera: a forced pose that became transmogrified, on film, into utter ease and spontaneity.)

  Still Glynnis would not let the matter rest, seemingly could not let it rest, alluding yet again to his “air of distraction” and the lengthy telephone call he’d made “that might have waited until morning.” Ian said irritably, “I didn’t make a telephone call, in fact. I tried to make it and couldn’t get through.” “Ah, I see,” Glynnis said, lighting up a cigarette and eyeing him frankly. “Was that how it was.” Ian walked out of the room, his heart beating hard; paused, thought better of his retreat, and came back; and told Glynnis that, since she asked, since she pressed the point, he supposed he was distracted much of the evening . . . by Bianca’s behavior, for one thing, but also by—how to express it?—his uneasy sense that there was something shrill and self-congratulatory about the party. “Us celebrating us,” he said.

  Immediately, even as the words were uttered, Ian knew they were terrible words, words never to be unsaid; yet, plunging head on, as something heated and constricted in Glynnis’s face seemed to bid him to do, he said, “I just felt, I suppose, that the occasion was somehow . . . excessive.”

  “But it was your fiftieth birthday,” Glynnis said, in a faint, hurt voice, as if he had struck her. “We’ve gone to other parties . . . like that.”

  “I don’t give a damn about my fiftieth birthday,” Ian said, trying, now, to make a joke of it, “or any of my birthdays. That, surely, you understand?”

  “But I love you,” Glynnis said, stubbornly, as if that were a refutation.

  So, repentant, Ian tried to temper what he’d said, for he had not meant it, exactly; but Glynnis was wounded, and struck out in bewilderment and rage; and within minutes, again, they were speaking angrily, in clumsy raised voices. And again Ian left the room, pain beginning between his eyes and his heart beating suffocatingly hard; and Glynnis shouted after him, in a fury, “Then go! Just—go! Go to hell!”

  (Ironically—or was it, by Hazelton’s anecdotal standards, comically?—Ian fled into town on the marvelous Schwinn racer Glynnis had given him for his birthday. He would not have trusted himself, in such circumstances, in such agitation, to drive a car.)

  In a telephone booth he’d called one of the numbers Sigrid Hunt had given him, a Manhattan number, and after many rings a woman answered; no, Sigrid wasn’t there and no she didn’t know where Sigrid was and no she couldn’t take a message—sorry. Her own life, she said, with a hint of malice, was complicated enough.

  Ian, embarrassed, tried to explain that he was a friend of Sigrid’s from upstate; his name Ian. He wanted very badly to speak with her, or, failing that, simply to know how she was—“How is her health, for instance?” There was a pause, a murmurous sound of voices in the background; perhaps Sigrid was there after all and would speak with him; but the woman said, “Her health is fine, mister,” and the sound, as of muffled laughter, increased; “how is yours?”

  A cruel, gratuitious remark; and now the dial tone hummed derisively in Ian’s ear. His cheeks burned as if he had been slapped. He thought, This is nothing less than you deserve.

  2.

  Some weeks before, in March, Ian had woken with the conviction that something had happened to Sigrid Hunt; for he had not heard from her in weeks; had seen her only once, briefly, in Manhattan, since the abortion. (Which she had had in the city, without telling Fermi; or so Ian gathered. It was all rather disconcertingly ambiguous, Sigrid Hunt’s relationship with the man she called her fiancé.)

  He thought of the apartment over the garage, that place of romance: the young woman’s attempts to decorate, to create her own space and style, in a derelict rain-rotted building whose first floor was used for storage. The scene of the crime, he thought it. If anything has happened to her, it has happened there.

  Instead of going to his office, Ian drove that morning down to Poughkeepsie, to 119 Tice, and persuaded the caretaker of the building that there was the possibility, a remote possibility but a real one, that something might have happened to the young woman who rented the apartment above the garage; and that they should unlock the door and see. “I have telephoned her any number of times,” Ian said nervously. “At this number, and at others she has given me. She is supposed to be here . . . but no one answers.”

  The caretaker, a man of Ian’s approximate age but curiously wizened and lethargic, with a sharp, shrewd, squinty eye, hesitated awhile, then did as Ian requested, without, as Ian had feared, asking who Ian was: without asking questions of any kind. He said only that he had not seen her (he referred to Sigrid Hunt solely as “her” or “she”) in a while but that he didn’t take much notice of tenants, kept his nose clean—“Which you soon learn to do, in a place like this.”

  But Sigrid Hunt was not in the apartment; the apartment was quite empty and rather stale-smelling and disordered,
as Ian recalled. He felt a shock of relief, yet also of disappointment. How reduced, how diminished, how inconsequential this setting, without Sigrid Hunt’s presence. . . . Simply Ian McCullough, trembling, in the company of a stranger who appeared, to the casual eye, to be in some way misshapen, and whose oddly audible breath suggested derision.

  No young woman’s partly clothed dead body, no signs of struggle, no evidence to suggest that Ian’s concern was anything less than intrusive. He was not a relative of hers after all; he was not even a lover. He said, apologetically, “Well. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

  There, the sofa bed with its crimson quilt hastily drawn over rumpled sheets; there, the dressmaker’s mirror at its careless slant, reflecting, now, merely a wall. The little woven carpets seemed less colorful, and more soiled, than Ian recalled; the Georgia O’Keeffe abstractions less coolly elegant, and rather more like magazine illustration, than he recalled. In the tiny kitchen a fly buzzed languidly, wakened from its long winter sleep; there were plates and several scummy glasses in the sink, which Ian had an urge to wash, to scrub and put away. He would have liked, were he alone and unobserved, to prowl about . . . to look through her closet and her bureau drawers. But he did no more than peek in the bathroom, which, of course, was empty. Again he said, glancing at the caretaker, whose name he did not know, “Well—I’m sorry.”

  The man was lounging in the doorway, arms folded, watching Ian. His left eyelid twitched as if in irrepressible mirth. “What’s to be sorry about, mister?” he said slyly. “She ain’t been killed like you was worried.”

  On the way out Ian, deeply ashamed, gave the man $25 for his trouble; and wondered, driving home, if $25 was enough.

  But how much, in these circumstances so very new and strange to me, would be enough?

  SOME YEARS BEFORE, Denis had told Ian obliquely, with a good deal of embarrassment, that he and Roberta were “going through a difficult time” in their marriage: that, in fact, there was the possibility of divorce—“It’s entirely Roberta’s decision, now.” Ian had stared at Denis in disbelief, not knowing what to say. Such confidences, such sudden revelations, were not Ian McCullough’s forte; nor were they Denis Grinnell’s. Ian stammered a response of some kind, must have asked a few questions, clumsy, wondering, “But you seem so happy, both of you, as happy as ever, it all seems so”—and he paused, without the vaguest idea of what he was saying, or meant to say—“seamless.”

  They were in Denis’s office, going through page proofs for the next issue of the Journal; it was late in the afternoon; most of the secretarial staff was gone. Denis had been fidgety and distracted for some time, but Ian had not, in truth, taken much note, and now he wondered too about Roberta; when was the last time he’d seen Roberta, and didn’t Glynnis see her, or speak with her on the telephone, virtually every day? . . . “Yes, right,” Denis said, startled by Ian’s oddly chosen word, “that’s Hazelton-on-Hudson’s ideal: the seamless façade.”

  Denis told Ian that it was his fault, essentially; no, it was his fault entirely; he’d become involved with another woman. “A woman I know professionally, she lives in La Jolla, we met at a conference, most of our meetings in fact were at conferences; she is no one you know,” Denis said carefully; “you, or Glynnis.” Now he was deeply embarrassed; his ears reddened; he could not quite look Ian in the eye. “I made a fool of myself, I think. It was a reckless sort of thing I couldn’t then undo; I didn’t want to hurt the woman, and I was attracted to her—Jesus, I shouldn’t minimize this, I was very attracted to her, sort of obsessed, you might say . . . for a while. I tried to make Roberta understand that it was essentially a mistake, an error, on my part; I tried to make her understand that it had nothing to do with her . . . and I think she finally understands. I think.”

  Ian said, “What would happen if you and Roberta were divorced?”

  “What do you mean? In terms of my career? I’d probably move away.”

  “Move away? From Hazelton? But where?”

  “I don’t know; Christ, I don’t want to think of that yet. As I said, it’s up to Roberta. I think we’ll be all right. . . .”

  Ian was hurt, resentful; in that moment, it seemed to him that Denis Grinnell had betrayed him, as he had betrayed Roberta. Were they not close friends?—close as brothers?—as, at the very least, the sentimental idea, among the brotherless, of brothers? He said, “I don’t think, Denis, I could bear it around here, the Institute, the Journal, without you.” (Though this was an extraordinary thing to say and not, on the face of it, wholly probable.) Denis, unnerved now by the turn the conversation had taken and wanting only to end it, said, “Well—I feel the same way about you.”

  And the subject was dropped; and never again taken up.

  And, to Ian’s infinite relief, the Grinnells remained married, their union as seamless as any in Hazelton.

  LIKE ANY LOVER—THOUGH of course he was not a lover—Ian McCullough believed he saw Sigrid Hunt sometimes, in places as unlikely as the local shopping center, or the dining room of the Institute; he saw, or seemed to see, her long glimmering rippled-red hair, her slender shoulders, her profile as it turned from him; but knew enough not to call her name, still less to cry out. It was not love he felt for her but—how could he define it?—an intense concern, a sympathy: a preoccupation, if such be possible, of an ethical nature. For all that he knew of the young woman’s life suggested a randomness both slovenly and stylized, a mode of being for which he felt an intense moral disapproval.

  And he loved Glynnis, of course.

  Even in sometimes resisting her, disliking her, raging against her, he loved her: that was absolute, final.

  For he could not conceive of his life, his very self, apart from her. She had saved his life when he had come close, at least in desire, to throwing his life away; and she continued to save it, Ian did not doubt, every day.

  Yet he spoke with Sigrid on the telephone, now and then: gave her advice, to which she listened or, flattering him, seemed to listen. After the abortion, she had stayed for a while with friends in Manhattan, in a loft on Vandam Street, below Houston; they’d met, for drinks, in a restaurant on Seventh Avenue, and Ian, in the city for the day, had wanted to take her to dinner as well; but Sigrid wasn’t free. My life is so complicated now, she said, with genuine, or genuine-seeming, regret; and Ian had laughed and said, When has your life not been complicated? He could not determine whether, in some way, she was still connected with Fermi Sabri or whether there was another man, or men, in her life. He was jealous, but only in the abstract. Ah, only in the abstract.

  The very night of his birthday party, Ian had tried to telephone Sigrid Hunt, for no particular reason other than, simply, to speak with her: to hear her voice. He had been enjoying the party enormously; he’d had a good deal to drink and was, in fact, deeply touched by his friends’ affection for him, and Glynnis’s extraordinary effort—the Château Mouton-Rothschild, for instance, was the first really good wine the McCulloughs had been able to afford, on the occasion of, was it, their fifth anniversary?—and of course she had remembered and served it with their main course. And then there was the Schwinn racer, which Ian would never have gotten around to buying for himself. . . . He’d been enjoying the party, certainly, after having overcome his initial surprise and disorientation; then, suddenly, perhaps because he’d had, simply, too much to eat and drink, a wave of disgust came over him, self-disgust, primarily; and he’d felt, sitting at his end of the table, being feted for his age, like a sacrificial victim of an archaic kind, one of those totemic demigods or luckless kings written up in anthropologists’ studies. Delicacies placed in the mouth of the victim’s (shrunken) head.

  I cannot breathe here, Ian thought, rising from the table.

  So he’d slipped inconspicuously away, into his study, assuming no one would miss him; for, at this point in the long, leisurely meal, one or two others had similarly excused themselves, to use the bathroom. He supposed it was a foolish thing to do, yes of cour
se it was foolish, very possibly it was desperate, and, punching out the glowing numerals on his phone, he’d consoled himself by thinking, Of course she won’t answer: her life is not continguous with mine. Hearing the voices and laughter in the other part of the house, washing wavelike, and distant.

  3.

  Now, as then, Glynnis was saying, rather sharply, “Ian, what is wrong with you? For Christ’s sake, what is wrong?”

  Her voice was slurred; she was drunk. And very angry.

  Ian had been standing in the courtyard, for how long he didn’t know: simply standing there, staring . . . at the evergreen shrubs he’d planted fifteen years ago; their names, which were very likely melodic, long since forgotten, as so much in his life, melodic, lyric, tender, precious, was forgotten. They were evergreens with low-sweeping boughs, bluish-green acicular needles, sharp as the thorns of roses. A sharp odor, too, but one Ian liked: a beautiful smell, if smells could be said to be beautiful.

  As if he had been thinking, all along, of such practical matters, Ian said quickly, “I was noticing that some of the evergreens are dying. I should clip them back, I suppose.” He paused, scarcely daring to look up; for surely Glynnis had been watching him for a while, had caught him out in one of his reveries.

  When he looked up, however, the doorway was empty. The door yawned wide.

  So he entered uneasily, called her name; the atmosphere was still, brittle—or so in his apprehension he thought it. “Glynnis? Is something wrong?” he said. He looked for her in the kitchen and in the guest room at the rear of the house; rapped on her bathroom door; found her in their bedroom, lying on top of the bed, in the dark. A smell that might have been medicinal, but was surely alcoholic, wafted toward him. “Honey? Is something wrong?”

  After a pause Glynnis said, “I have a headache. Why don’t you let me alone.”