I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She never found Blue Guitar. But there was Firs Inn & Marina on the river. Near downtown police headquarters, it was said to be a popular hangout for off-duty cops. Neon flashed in every window. Behind the inn was the marina. A flotilla of sailboats. Flags on their tall masts whipped in the wind. Speedboats, yachts, rocked with the waves. In the vestibule of the inn, warm, smelly air rushed at her as if out of the past. Her heart quickened. How relieved she was to be here. To have avoided the relatives. The funeral luncheon given by a younger sister of her father’s. There the relatives murmured, scolding, Now where’s Vivian? And Harvey would repeat, She’s in shock. I told you, let her alone.

  Harvey loved her. Harvey, her big brother. Harvey would protect Vivie even from himself.

  Vivian stepped into the dimly lighted bar and quickly calculated where to sit: at the bar, or in one of the booths. A booth was always a prudent idea. But at the bar she could catch fugitive glimpses of her face in the mirror behind rows of glittering bottles. In her thirties, somehow she’d become a woman who looked her best in tawdry lights. Flashing neon like a fevered pulse. She was relaxed, she was prone to laughter. Even when she’d been a serious graduate student in English literature, even when she’d been a promising assistant professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton she’d rewarded herself for bad times by visiting such places.

  Vivian sat at the bar. Except for an amorous couple, the girl in a leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings, bouffant hair, the other eight or nine patrons at the bar were men. She ordered a scotch on the rocks. The bartender was trying not to be curious about her, she hoped to Christ she hadn’t gone to Perrysburg High with him.

  Drinking clarified. Confusion dissolved. She smiled to think that from a certain perspective all of that day of her father’s funeral including the vision of light flashing out from the closed casket had been leading to this moment of grace: Vivian’s first serious drink in months.

  She wanted to be alone, she would have said. When a husky bearded man with a familiar face, seated a few stools away, leaned over to say hello, asked if she was Vivie West, Vivian shook her head without engaging him. But a while later, when she was about to order a second drink, another man drifted past, carrying his drink, she glanced up and their eyes locked and he asked, O.K. if I join you? and Vivian indicated yes, it was O.K. The man was no one she knew, she was certain. He was about forty years old. He looked married, but he wasn’t wearing a ring. He slid onto the stool beside her, brushing against her arm. He squinted at her, seeing a melancholy face. A very pale face. She’d penciled in dark boldly defined eyebrows. She’d outlined her eyes in black mascara like eyes in a Matisse painting. Her mouth was fleshy, pouting. In her car, before coming inside, she’d removed her wedding ring. Her companion was saying, “Some people, some women, don’t like cops so I’ll tell you right off: I’m with the PPD.”

  Vivian laughed. “I’m not ‘some women.’ ”

  They exchanged first names. They even shook hands. He was a plainclothes office, a detective. Desire coursed through her suddenly like an electric current.

  “I DON’T KNOW him. I don’t trust him. I adore him.”

  It was her brother Harvey she spoke of, to herself. For driving to Perrysburg on the occasion of her father’s terrible death was also driving to Perrysburg to meet with Harvey. Always Vivian’s heart stirred with urgency, part tenderness, part dread, when she thought of her brother.

  Through childhood he’d been Vivie’s protector. Through much of her girlhood. Her girlfriends had envied her an older brother; an older brother with such swaggering style. When you’re a girl in public school to have a brother three years older means being spared the gauntlet of boys’ rude appraising stares, sniggering remarks and innuendos, muffled laughter. When a boy took Vivie West out on a date he was taking out Harvey West’s younger sister. “I was treated with respect because of you,” Vivian told Harvey once they were adults, and spoke calmly of the past. “Maybe you never realized that.”

  Harvey said, “Sure I knew it. Any guy who looked at you cross-eyed, I’d have punched him out.”

  They laughed together, startled. As if excited by the prospect.

  In recent years, as their widower-father aged, Vivian and Harvey, his only children, were more in contact with each other of necessity. Harvey, who lived in Perrysburg, took on responsibilities he might not have anticipated as a younger man; Vivian, living ninety miles away in Rochester, returned more frequently to Perrysburg, and spoke more frequently on the phone with her father and with Harvey. A noose tightening, she’d felt it.

  But no. She loved her father. And she loved Harvey, if at a distance.

  Harvey had been reporting to Vivian how forgetful their father was becoming, and how furious he was if you brought up the subject. Harvey had said, laughing over the phone, “I’m getting afraid of the old man. He’s got a sting like a hornet.” Vivian too had noted the accumulating dirt in the household. A smell of stale, unwashed things. And her father’s personal odor, of which she would no more speak than she would have uttered an obscenity in his presence. Vivian and Harvey discussed the possibility of hiring, over their father’s objections, a younger, more reliable cleaning woman, but finally decided, no. “Not just Dad would be so angry, but Mrs. Lunt”—always they spoke of the heavyset black woman by her formal name, respectfully, as they’d been taught—“would be broken up. And her sons…” Harvey’s voice trailed off irresolutely. Vivian thought: Is he afraid of them? Of what they might do to Dad?

  After the fire Vivian would wonder if Mrs. Lunt’s sons had anything to do with it. While she and Harvey still lived at home there had been talk of Mrs. Lunt’s several sons in trouble with police; they’d spent time in juvenile facilities, and eventually in prison.

  But when Vivian brought this possibility up to Harvey he’d responded with annoyance. “Look, Viv. The police chief said he thought it was probably the wiring, or a space heater. Remember that antiquated space heater of Dad’s? Don’t fantasize about this accident. And don’t start thinking race.”

  Vivian felt her face burn, so rebuked.

  Still she thought: Dr. West had believed that the neighborhood revered him, which may have been true, generally. But there had been break-ins, acts of vandalism, over the years. Harvey had had the burglar alarm installed after someone broke into their father’s office looking for drugs and cash. “Dad wanted to think everyone loved him but maybe not everyone did. It would only have taken one. Maybe the fire was to cover up a burglary, maybe to cover up an assault…” Vivian spoke quietly. She refrained from saying a murder.

  Harvey shrugged. The subject offended him, clearly. He told again of how forgetful their father was becoming, and how he’d allowed stacks of medical journals and other magazines to accumulate in the downstairs, rear rooms of the house. Harvey had questioned the wisdom of their father saving, for instance, copies of Science and The New England Journal of Medicine dating back to the seventies. The seventies! Thirty years! “ ‘How can I throw anything away without having read it thoroughly?’ Dad asked me, like he was explaining something to a moron, ‘and if I’ve read it, underlined and annotated it, and it’s valuable, how can I throw it away?’ ”

  They laughed uneasily together, Harvey had so perfectly mimicked their dead father’s voice.

  It wasn’t at that moment that Vivian first thought Did you set the fire, Harvey? I would hate you if you had. But I would never betray you. This thought came to her afterward, as she stared at the Polaroid image of a barricaded doorway and blackened stucco materializing slowly before her eyes.

  HE WAS EXPLAINING to her that arson is usually easy to detect, if set by an amateur.

  “A legitimate fire is an accident. It takes time to spread. It smolders, half the time it goes out. It moves unevenly through a house, erratically. Not like a fire started with an accelerant, like kerosene, lighter fluid, that moves in a direct line, and fast. And hot. An accidental fire begins low and moves up, in a room I m
ean. And in a house. Of course, if it begins in an upstairs room or an attic, that’s different. And if there’s combustible material. But most accidental fires it’s bad wiring, space heaters too near curtains or they get knocked over by kids, candles that fall over, sparks out of a chimney, somebody’s smoking in bed and falls asleep, or, this happens with old people, they put a kettle on the stove, walk away and forget it…Each fire has its own history, they say. Like the family it happens to.” He was speaking matter-of-factly, professionally. Vivian was listening in a way that might be described as professional. No interruptions, no evident emotion. She’d told him why she was in Perrysburg: a relative’s death by fire. That terrible fire on Church Street. Sure, he knew about it. Possibly he guessed that Vivian was the elderly doctor’s daughter but he was a tactful man, he let that go. If they saw each other again, she’d tell him then. Or maybe.

  They’d moved from the bar to one of the booths. Where their conversation could be more private. They were on their third drinks. He was paying, somehow he’d finessed the move. Vivian who’d told him only her first name was thinking she wanted to take the man’s dense, curly hair in her hands; wanted to embrace him, tight; because she didn’t know him, he was all potential, mystery. His first name was Arnold—his friends called him Arne. “Arne.” Vivian spoke the name as if testing it. Arne. I want to make love with you.

  No, it wouldn’t work. Vivian didn’t want to make love with any man, even a plainclothes detective with the Perrysburg PD, whose name was Arne.

  His last name, she’d later learn, was Malinski, Malinowski. She wouldn’t ask him to repeat it or spell it. She wouldn’t ask if he was married. Probably yes, but he was separated from his wife and feeling the strain, the loneliness, heavy-hearted, anxious about his children (for obviously there’d be children), and she hoped he wouldn’t be bitter, angry at women because he was angry at a woman. Though if that was true she couldn’t blame him, could she?

  Roll a drum upon the blue guitar. Vivian smiled.

  Her companion told her that there were fires, every winter especially, in the Church Street neighborhood, because of the old houses, and too many people living in some of them. “Usually it’s small children who die. Single mothers, and they can’t save them.” Vivian nodded as if subtly rebuked. She liked this man’s manner. He had authority but he wasn’t a bully. He had knowledge inaccessible to her but he didn’t flaunt it. He was allowing her to know: accidents happen, people die in fires, and some of these are young children, not elderly men.

  And maybe he hadn’t wanted to live, maybe at the end of his life that had been his secret. Vivian didn’t want to think so.

  Vivian asked the detective how he’d come to be such an expert on fires, it was the kind of remark a woman made to a man for whom she felt an attraction, not a serious remark entirely, though the man could take it seriously, as this man did, saying he wasn’t an expert, what he’d been telling her was common knowledge. He didn’t add I’m a detective, are you bullshitting me, lady?

  Here was a man who didn’t want flattery from a woman. Maybe that meant he’d be honest with her, too.

  Which Vivian wasn’t sure she wanted.

  The point of picking up a man in a bar, the evening of your father’s funeral, hadn’t that much to do with wanting honesty, sincerity. She’d seen the detective glance at her ring finger, and wondered uneasily now if it was obvious she’d only just removed a ring; and what that signalled.

  From time to time men passed by their booth, and Vivian’s companion smiled and waved at them but didn’t encourage them to linger, his friends, fellow cops. Vivian knew they must be curious about her. Who is Arne with? That woman averting her eyes, casually shielding her face with an uplifted hand. She dreaded someone recognizing her. Harvey had PPD friends. High school buddies. They’d know her as Harvey West’s kid sister, all grown up.

  She said, “If it’s arson, then. You’re saying it’s easy to detect?”

  Her words weren’t so clearly enunciated as she’d wished. The alcohol coursing warmly through her veins, she felt illuminating her veins like Christmas lights, but now there was a swerve to the motion, like white water rapids in a river. A giddy sensation, she had to fight an impulse to laugh and grip the edge of the booth’s table to steady herself.

  He said, “ ‘Easy’ to detect? I didn’t say that. Not if the fire’s done by a pro.”

  “ ‘Pro’—?”

  “Professional arsonist.”

  Vivian stared at her companion. In the bar light his skin had appeared coarse, a sliver of scar tissue above his left eye. But he’d been smiling then, and he’d looked almost boyish, hopeful. Now, in this more refracted light, partly obscured by smoke from his own cigarette, his features were less distinctive, and she wasn’t sure of the expression in his eyes. Did he think she was a fool? Was he calculating his chances with her, sexually? And what would be the consequence, if any? Or maybe, a detective now by instinct as well as training, he saw that she was in a state of something like shock, numbed, uncertain what she wanted from him, or from this conversation; a woman intent upon getting drunk, not by herself.

  Faintly Vivian said, “I guess I didn’t realize. That there are professional arsonists.”

  “Vivian, there’s a professional everything.”

  Rebuked another time, feeling her face burn, Vivian excused herself and went to the women’s rest room, a grimy pink-walled cubicle like the interior of a womb, and there was her skillfully made-up face in the mirror, startlingly young-looking and defiant. She fumbled for her cell phone in her bag, dialed Harvey’s number. No answer. And no answering machine. “God damn you, Harvey. Where are you!” She used the lavatory and washed her hands and reapplied lipstick like a schoolgirl mashing it on. She wondered if he had a condom, obviously yes. Never would Vivian carry anything so incriminating, or so hopeful, in her bag. Now she was married, of course not.

  Then she thought suddenly, He isn’t waiting for me. He’s gone. That will make it easier.

  So convincing was this thought, when she saw that the detective who called himself Arne was waiting for her in the booth, with the patience of a lover, arms crossed, smoking a cigarette and squinting toward her, she was surprised. He had dark, thick hair trimmed high around his ears. He wore a nondescript dark coat, a white shirt, and no tie. She hoped to hell it wouldn’t turn out he’d gone to school with Harvey, he was about that age. For a moment she saw desire in his face, too. The rawness of it, that registers as a kind of surprise, wholly unpremeditated. And something yearning, vulnerable. It was rare to see such an expression in a man’s face, in such circumstances. What this man must know of women. What ugly truths no skill at makeup, charm, female subterfuge could disguise.

  She must have appeared uncertain, wavering. A wan half-smile on her face. He was on his feet beside her, lightly touching her arm.

  “Should we leave? Go somewhere? Is that what you’d like, Vivian?”

  He spoke quietly. He wasn’t trying to coerce her. Her name on his lips made her feel weak, fated.

  “Yes,” Vivian said. “That’s what I’d like.”

  So that’s life then. Things as they are.

  She tried to recall the rest of it. Picks its way on the blue guitar.

  HARVEY WAS ASKING where she’d been. In that mode of brotherly disgust that signalled he didn’t expect a truthful answer. Like Vivian he carried himself cautiously, not wanting the crystalline honeycomb of his brain to shatter in this too-vivid daylight. Vivian wondered where Harvey had been drinking the night before, and with whom. “I tried to call you last night at the motel. No answer,” he said.

  Vivian had insisted upon staying at a motor inn in Perrysburg. Not with any of the relatives. Nor even with Harvey, who had a spare room. If she couldn’t stay in her old room in the house at 819 Church Street she wanted to be alone with her grief, in neutral territory; the relatives could sympathize, even Harvey wouldn’t have guessed how before she’d set out on her journey from Rochest
er she’d vaguely imagined, in the way of a fever patient fantasizing some measure of relief in which in fact she can’t force herself to believe, cruising those downtown bars, finding a man.

  Had it been in the Blue Guitar she’d found him? Vivian would try to remember it that way.

  She said, defensively, “I called you, Harvey. Several times. No answer.”

  Harvey wasn’t going to ask Were you out drinking? He wasn’t going to remove her dark glasses to expose her eyes.

  There was this unexpected tact, this delicacy of manner, in her brother. Not wanting to expose Vivian, or embarrass her. Or humiliate her. He didn’t appear to be the type. He spoke of himself as a light-heavyweight, meaning in the vicinity of one hundred ninety pounds, he had a retired boxer’s confidence in his body, a shrewd impassive face blunt as a shovel upon which he fitted wire-framed glasses with mother-of-pearl nosepieces. This side of Harvey, almost you might call it a feminine side, made him attractive to women, not always with good results for the women. He complained now he’d been damned worried about her, under the circumstances.

  “Harvey, I’m sorry. I needed to be alone…”

  It was mid-afternoon of the day following their father’s funeral. They were in Harvey’s seventh floor apartment overlooking the choppy, wind-tormented Niagara River. A treacherous river, especially above the Falls some miles away. A magnet for the melancholy, the self-punishers. You might imagine a swift easy death except death by Niagara Falls is so brutal, the dead are often unrecognizable. Vivian wasn’t going to say I’m not suicidal.