Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Was that Ryan?—in the hospital café? This was an attractive café meant to mimic an outdoor café, in the atrium. Decorative stands of bamboo, of a uniform height of about twelve feet, surrounded the white plastic tables and chairs, of which approximately one-half were occupied.

  Julia saw to her dismay that the husband, seen from the back, was seated at a table with a woman, a stranger—(Julia was sure the woman was a stranger)—who appeared to be a hospital patient for she was attached by an IV line to a portable trolley beside her chair. A woman of no discernible age except not young in a pale blue striped hospital gown, and over the gown an oversized cardigan sweater, haphazardly buttoned. And on her head, a scarf; for her head seemed to be bare, her scalp was hairless, without the scarf she’d have looked newborn as a baby chick, touching and vulnerable. And very thin. Julia was puzzled—she’d never seen this emaciated woman before, she was sure.

  In a stammer of horror she thought—Is that me? Is that who I’ve become? And Ryan has come to see me, to say good-bye.

  Tenderly the husband was touching the emaciated woman’s arm. The husband was himself thinner than the wife recalled, with a scalp that shone as if waxen. His back was to her, she could see his sharp shoulder bones like wings poking through skin and cloth. The shirt he wore was no shirt Julia recognized. What were he and the woman speaking of, so earnestly? It was a startling sight—the woman was able to smile, she and her companion laughed together.

  But what could be so funny? Was Death funny?

  The wife felt excluded, cheated. She felt betrayed. The husband had never shared his death with her.

  Soon then, the woman rose unsteadily to her feet and left the café. A nurse, or a nurse’s aide, had come for her. A handsome dark-skinned girl with a bright smile. Taking the sick woman by the arm, and tugging at the IV trolley which moved with practiced ease in their wake. The husband stood, not altogether steadily on his feet either, preparing to leave the café. He was checking his watch—Julia saw, he’d been waiting for an appointment. The sick woman in the café hadn’t been the sole object of his visit after all, his meeting with her might have been accidental, innocent.

  It was quite probable Ryan was visiting a relative in the hospital. If he’d had an appointment with one of the medical specialists she would have known, he would have told her. Those effusive conversations he sometimes had on the telephone, in his study with the door shut—might’ve been a relative. Ryan had an easy jocular bantering relationship with cousins both female and male. He loved them, Julia knew. He’d grown up with them, they were his closest and oldest friends.

  Julia wasn’t jealous. Julia didn’t allow herself such petty emotions. If jealousy was an emotion.

  And so, who was in the hospital? One of the (elder) Vanns, who had never liked Julia, for what reason she could not comprehend. Decades since she’d cried herself to sleep over such inexplicable rejection.

  But now—where was the husband? His gait had been stiff, as if one of his legs gave him pain. Possibly, Ryan was seeing a back specialist. She’d begun to follow him belatedly, but he was gone—in a men’s restroom possibly.

  Long high-ceilinged corridors. Elevators with Plexiglas panels.

  The hospital opened out of the atrium, corridors like spokes. This was Julia’s first visit to the new hospital. If Ryan had come here previously, he hadn’t brought Julia, and he hadn’t shared his news with Julia.

  This visit was his secret. The identity of the patient was his secret.

  She went to the hospital information counter and asked if there was a patient in the hospital named “Vann.” The receptionist told her that such information was “restricted.” She said, “But I’m sure that a relative of mine is hospitalized here, and I’d like to see him. As long as I’m here.”

  “And what is the patient’s full name?”

  Julia hesitated. She had no idea what to say. It made no sense to say “Ryan”—for “Ryan Vann” wasn’t a patient here—was he?

  “Ma’am? What is the patient’s first name?”

  Her breathing came labored and thick. Somehow, the air had turned viscous. Or, she’d fallen, and was being sucked into a kind of quicksand.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am? Hello, ma’am . . .”

  They were leaning over her, where she’d fallen. Something like a great mouth had been sucking her down. The interior of the mouth was tepid, lukewarm, not chill as you’d expect. A briny odor as of old, stale urine which was a surprise in this sparkling-new hospital.

  “Ma’am? Can you stand up? Sit up? Are you breathing all right?”

  “Ma’am, just lean on me.”

  So embarrassing! In the hospital of all places she’d fainted; or not exactly fainted for she hadn’t lost consciousness—(she was sure she hadn’t lost consciousness for even a moment). And they were making a fuss over her, and didn’t want her to stand up too quickly, take her handbag from them, and escape.

  A blood-pressure cuff was being put on her upper arm. She hadn’t given permission. Tight, tighter, tighter—Julia winced with the sharp pain.

  Her blood pressure was very low, she was told. And her heartbeat—(one of the young black girls had dared to press her thumb against the underside of Julia’s wrist)—was rapid.

  “I—I’m fine. There’s nothing the matter with me.”

  They wanted to take her into the ER. She was too weak to walk and so they would carry her on a stretcher. She insisted—No! She would not.

  She was sitting on a bench. They’d allowed that. At the edge of a little gathering of observers, Julia dreaded to think that Ryan might be among them—staring in amazement at his wife! But she didn’t see him. She was feeling vast relief, he hadn’t seen her.

  At last after several contentious minutes she managed to break free of the strangers. Managed to convince them she was all right. In their chiding voices they were saying, “We can’t force you, ma’am. But you should check into the ER. You were unconscious, you ‘fainted.’ Did you wet yourself?”

  “No! I certainly did not.”

  Furious and ashamed Julia turned away. She knew they were watching her—waiting for her to weaken, falter and again fall to her knees on the polished floor—but she did not. A safe distance from the information counter she saw a women’s restroom, entered a stall and checked her clothing—yes, her underpants seemed to be “wetted” but odorless. (Was this colorless liquid urine? It didn’t smell at all.) In one of the toilet stalls she waited patiently until no one was in the room before leaving but couldn’t locate her car in the immense parking lot that dazzled and blinded with light. Where was Ryan’s station wagon? Had he moved it? Had he driven home?

  Eventually, Julia located her car. When she returned home she saw without surprise, Ryan’s station wagon wasn’t in the driveway.

  WHERE YOU ARE GOING. Take me with you!

  She lay close beside him. Stealthily, she embraced him from behind. She did not want to wake him. His breathing was raspy, wet-sounding. She pressed her warm face against the wiry hairs of the man’s upper back. It had been years since she’d held the husband so close, so intimately. And she, the wife, so exposed and vulnerable, her arms open to him. She was risking rejection, a shrugging sleep-blunted rebuff. But Ryan was asleep and couldn’t know. His was a deep gasping medicated sleep that excluded all awareness of the wife, as of the exterior world. But in this sleep he murmured as if speaking to her, and this was a surprise. Clumsily he turned in the bed, as he rarely did in his deepest sleep. He pulled at the covers, partially detaching the upper sheet, and he gave a little moan, and pressed against the wife, his soft, limp penis, that stirred against her thigh, the most subtle stirring of life, a kind of sigh, an indrawn breath, a vow.

  THINGS PASSED ON THE WAY TO OBLIVION

  WHEN DOES FATAL BEGIN. YOU LIVE IT, BUT YOU CAN’T name it.

  HER FIRST RESPONSE was No. But this was only the first response.

  Her most forceful girl-cousin had brought her in the late-Saturday-night midsu
mmer craziness of the East Village to Avenue B to Fleurs du Mal (Tattoos). She’d protested laughing nervously—the last thing she needed in her jangled life right now was a tattoo—she’d always felt a fastidious revulsion for tattoos—but Carroll had a way of insisting that made you think that, when you gave in, you were making her personally happy and so—somehow—Leanda’s protest had turned into a weak Well—all right . . . Carroll hugged her fiercely, the kind of quick hard hug you’d get from a teammate after a score. Fantastic! We’ll pick something really beautiful for you beautiful Leanda.

  IT WAS SO: she was beautiful Leanda. You had to know Leanda intimately to know that beauty had never been enough.

  IN THE BRIGHTLY-LIT tattoo shop amid deafening rock music she’d felt a thrill of daring as if—at last—she was doing something to define herself. Something risky and risqué no one in the family would expect of her.

  Black butterfly! Terrific.

  Your first? Great choice: it’s Chinese.

  Like, from a Chinese scroll? Ancient.

  Well sure—it will hurt, some. The needle will sting. That’s what a tattoo is—a little (temporary) pain for (permanent) beauty.

  THE PLEASURE OF GIVING in, weakly. To people who mattered: family. All her young life the keenest pleasure.

  GUESS HOW OLD my cousin Lee-lee is?

  Foxy Joe Hall the tattoo artist at Fleurs du Mal had guessed—nineteen? Twenty-one? Totally surprised to learn the stiff-smiling girl was twenty-seven.

  As long as she isn’t underage. We don’t do underage.

  A reputable tattoo shop also will not oblige customers who are obviously drunk, high, or mentally ill. Professional ethics!

  Leanda wasn’t drunk, and Leanda wasn’t high. This was a fact.

  Foxy Joe Hall had executed all three of Carroll’s super-action-heroine manga-tattoos. These were smart, cool, sexy tattoos nothing like the black butterfly which was too girly for Carroll Johnston. Like black-lace lingerie Carroll wouldn’t be caught dead in.

  How’s your tats? Enjoying them?

  You know I am, Joe! Absolutely.

  No one saw Carroll’s tattoos except very special people. No one was so trusted except very special people. The stylish three-inch manga-tats were on her belly, on the inside of her left thigh, on her right buttock. Carroll was a solid-muscled girl of almost-thirty built like a Henry Moore sculpture. You might mistake her for hefty or overweight seen from a little distance but not up-close. She was plain-faced, snub-nosed, icy-blue-eyed, cool. Her hair was metallic-blond. In Vineyard Haven, Edgartown, and Chilmark she’d been going door-to-door that summer requesting signatures on a petition to recall those Martha’s Vineyard officials who hadn’t been vigilant enough regarding sand dune conservation and it was said Carroll Johnston was so forceful she’d accumulated more signatures than any other petitioner in memory.

  These tats she’d had now for several years were kept secret inside her baggy clothing—cargo pants, T-shirts, prized old Dartmouth swim-team sweatshirt—if older family members/relatives were anywhere near.

  Carroll looked on while Foxy Joe worked his miracle-precision needle on Leanda’s pale shoulder. The girl’s skin did seem to him weirdly thin—the girl was mixed-race—some kind of Asian or South Pacific—but her skin was whiter than his. Delicate like silk a rough-calloused thumb could tear.

  Oh oh oh!—the needle did hurt.

  Like anything physical, almost. What was called love-making—though Leanda had learned to pretend otherwise, love-making always hurt.

  She was a stoic, however. She’d learned, young.

  A stoic, good-sport, l’il dude. As a child of five or six already she’d learned how to inveigle the Johnstons into liking her, that’s to say finding a place in their hearts for her, with her shy stammering ways and shiny-black-winking eyes.

  Adults you can fool, usually. Your own generation sees through you with a smirk.

  Like wading in the surf at the private beach in Chilmark. She’d never tried to swim there like the others who threw themselves into the water without hesitation shouting with laughter. And the crazed family dog Paolo—Portuguese water spaniel—rushing among them colliding with Leanda if she wasn’t careful. She’d weighed approximately ninety-seven pounds at her heaviest. If she waded out too far in a pretense of swimming she was in danger of being swept up by the waves, thrown down gasping for air and her skin scraped raw, bruised by pebbles.

  Swimming is such a fun-thing, she’d had to hide the fact she hated it. Like love-making she tried to see was necessary, and practical, if any man was going to “love” her.

  (At the beach no one had judged her harshly. She was sure. Carroll, Jody, and Quinn had been star team-swimmers at their schools, and would go on to compete at Dartmouth, Williams, Sarah Lawrence. Of her tall strapping blond boy-cousins all but one or two were jocks for whom swimming had been just one of the sports they’d been good at. They’d laughed at l’il dude Lee-lee but they’d liked her too. She was sure.)

  How’re you doin’, Leanda? We’re at the halfway mark now—almost.

  Too distracted by the buzzing pain to respond. She’d have thought—twenty minutes? Thirty? Already forty excruciating minutes had passed. Not even halfway!

  Stiff and straight in the swivel chair she sat, so short her feet didn’t reach the floor. Her jaws were locked with strain. The chair was like a dentist’s chair, and the buzzing needle was like a dentist’s drill. In the mirror-to-the-ceiling she watched with fascinated horror the black butterfly materialize on her left shoulder. In bright lights that made her eyes water, she saw her quick-oozing blood wiped away. The butterfly was “life-sized”—in fact, a little larger than a typical monarch butterfly, that seemed to be pushing out of her very flesh.

  What Daddy would say! He’d been disgusted with her frequently, but never for anything visible and incontestable as this.

  The more beautiful the skin, the more it hurts. Like Einstein says there’s no free lunch in the Universe, eh?

  Leanda had no idea what Foxy Joe was talking about. The tattoo artist was one of those easy talkers—bull-shitters. Most guys you met were bull-shitters. Since she’d been a young girl Leanda had learned not to look startled but to smile in a kind of sly complicity.

  Einstein means no energy is ever totally lost, Joe. It’s just converted—energy into matter, matter into energy.

  What the fuck’s that, my friend?

  What I said, Joe: energy into matter, matter into energy. E equals MC squared.

  Carroll was one to weigh in on intellectual subjects. All of the Johnstons—except Leanda’s mother and Leanda herself, of course—were like this. You’d think that someone had handed them a microphone. There were politicians in the family, in Maine and New Hampshire—U.S. congressmen. A Johnston had been chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court in the 1950s and another Johnston had been an Eisenhower advisor. Leanda knew little of the family’s history for little had been told her, she was of the present generation. She wasn’t always sure if her cousin Carroll knew half of what she was talking about but Carroll spoke with such confidence, no one questioned her.

  Carroll leaned close to observe Foxy Joe’s quivering needle and the startling-red blood that oozed out around it. So absorbed, she hadn’t answered her cell phone when it rang—the opening bars of “Paint It Black.”

  Ordinarily Leanda would have been stricken with embarrassment, this stranger, Foxy Joe Hall, so close to her, breathing his hot breath on her, that smelled of something like licorice; nudging his groin against her, as if he wasn’t aware of what he was doing. A tattoo was a sexual—sexy—thing Leanda was doing, or having done to her—she guessed that Carroll saw it that way.

  Foxy Joe was telling Leanda to sit still please. And could she try not to shiver so much.

  Was Leanda shivering? Air-conditioning was blasting onto her face and her partially bared torso, her tank-top pulled down her shoulder so that Foxy Joe could ply his needle. But the tattoo artist needed AC, the
bright lights and the “high degree of concentration” raised his temperature.

  Foxy Joe had graying rust-colored hair in a ponytail and appeared to be, inside his clothes, covered in tattoos. Clusters like coiled snakes on both his arms and rising onto his neck, just the look of it, such density, made Leanda feel dizzy. Carroll had introduced Foxy Joe Hall to Leanda as “the crème de la crème of tattoo artists.”

  Foxy Joe dressed like a hipster in his early thirties but up close you could see the man was fifty at least. The skin on his forehead was unnaturally tight but the soft puckered skin around the eyes was unmistakable. Piercings in his nose, eyebrows, ears, and cheeks made him glitter like a pincushion. Carroll had boasted that Foxy Joe was so picky, he’d turned away customers because the tattoos they’d wanted were “unaesthetic”—or they themselves were “unaesthetic”—(“that is, ugly”)—it was like getting admitted into an exclusive club, having a tat by Foxy Joe.

  At Fleurs du Mal, the smallest and simplest tattoos started at $199 excluding taxes.

  Carroll had said, squeezing Leanda’s chill little fingers This one’s on me, Lee-lee. Next one you can purchase for yourself.

  LATER IT WOULD BE NARRATED—(within the family initially, then in the media)—that Leanda had insisted upon a tattoo on the night of July 29. She’d asked Carroll to take her to the tattoo parlor on Avenue B where Carroll had gotten her tattoos. It would be narrated that Leanda had been in a “mood”—(maybe code for high? coke-high?)—she’d been sulky, vengeful—she’d known how a tattoo would upset her father with his ridiculous antiquated notions of feminine beauty, and she’d wanted to upset the old man, for sure.

  Really? Leanda? Doesn’t sound like her.

  Well, she was high. I was surprised, too—I’d always thought I knew Leanda. A lot of a quiet person’s personality comes out when she’s high and not being observed by her elders. I don’t mean that Leanda was a hypocrite or anything like that but—she wasn’t aware of the rage she felt, I think, for all of us, growing up with us, and for her father and how he treated her. You never get over being adopted, and there’s the—race thing. And at the wedding she’d made a fool of herself, she kept obsessing about some stupid wine spilled on her stupid dress asking me if any of it had gotten online.