I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  High overhead Canadian geese flew in a precise V-formation, south. Always that was a pleasing sight. Like a compass pointing true north.

  Vivian understood that her shrewd older brother saw something in her face this afternoon, a memory of the previous night, and the long dreamy hours of that night, he hadn’t expected to see. But he couldn’t know. As it turned out, Arne was acquainted with Harvey West but didn’t know him well, and Vivian knew he had no reason to call Harvey. Not if he wanted to see Vivian again.

  Harvey said accusingly, “Viv. What are you smiling at?”

  He was teasing. But Vivian was smiling, staring after the geese.

  She said, quickly, “Imagining Aunt Ida’s luncheon yesterday. What they said of me. ‘Poor Vivie! So thin’—the old biddies. Dad was well out of it, yes? He’d have been bored to death.”

  “Vivie.”

  She hadn’t meant to say that. They laughed together like deranged children.

  They sat at a table beside a sliding glass door, floor to ceiling, that led out to a balcony. Glaring sunshine, Vivian had a good excuse to keep on her dark glasses. Harvey had spread their father’s legal documents and other papers on the table. He had practical things to inform her, ask her. Vivian had forgotten how tedious death can be. The aftermath, the tidying-up. Now we have no ritual dressing of the dead, no solemn washing, ointments, winding cloths, only just legal documents. The will, insurance policies. But there was also furniture, a few things spared from the fire (“But stinking of smoke”) and many things in storage, inherited furniture from both their parents’ families Vivian had forgotten. Some of these items were valuable antiques, maybe. Vivian had the idea that Harvey wanted her to ask for some of them, a sentimental gesture. But she wanted nothing. The Polaroid snapshots, which she’d shown her lover of the night before, revealed nothing, contained no suggestion of emotion, mere objects to break the heart in the raw light of day. Vivian nodded as Harvey spoke. He had a droning, punishing voice for such occasions. This is fucking boring, I know. So you won’t be spared, either. Vivian interrupted to ask, “Did you know there are professional arsonists, Harvey? Men whose living is setting fires that can’t be detected?” Vivian watched her brother sidelong. He was staring at her. “Well, of course you’d know. There’s a professional everything, I guess.”

  Vivian could hear Harvey draw in his breath slowly. She wondered what he would say. But he said only, after a moment, “There isn’t an arson that can’t be detected by someone. I’m sure. I wish you’d get off the subject, O.K.? The fire is being investigated. If the insurer doesn’t trust the verdict, the insurer will investigate, too. There’s a lot of money involved. But we have other things to talk about.”

  “Arson would mean murder, Harvey. If our father was murdered, we would want to talk about that.”

  Harvey was tapping a pen against his glasses. He said meanly, “Maybe it was suicide, Viv. But we won’t go into that.”

  Vivian said excitedly, “Daddy wouldn’t have wanted to die in such a way! He didn’t believe in needless suffering. He had other options—barbiturates, morphine.”

  “Which can be detected. He’d know that.”

  Vivian said, stung, “Did Dad talk about things like that with you?”

  Harvey said curtly, “He had to have someone to talk to. He was an old, sick man. I’m his son, see? I live here.”

  Vivian stammered, “I—loved him, too. I came to see him. I talked with him on the phone…”

  Harvey shook his head impatiently, he’d had enough of the subject.

  He had documents for Vivian to peruse. Legal forms she’d have to sign in the presence of their father’s attorney. Vivian tried to concentrate but was feeling faint. The estate was larger than she’d expected. The property insurance, the life insurance. Real-estate investments. Several million dollars. But then she hadn’t wanted to expect anything. She fumbled in her handbag for a tissue. In the handbag was the detective’s card. The name was “Arnold Joseph Malinowski.” He’d scrawled his home number in pencil below his PD number. She’d been right, he was separated from his wife. And from his children. His heart had been lacerated, she knew. But he spared her details. She’d spared him. They’d held each other through what had remained of the night. He was an ardent lover, hungry and desperate as Vivian herself. She’d experienced sharp, intense sexual pleasure, that echoed now in her memory. Her female body that possessed its own secret memory. She foresaw that her life would become mysterious again, rich and corrupt.

  Death is the mother of beauty. The line of poetry floated to her like music. Never before had she taken it as true, only as paradoxical and annoying in the way that poetic paradoxes are annoying; now she saw that it might be true. In the right circumstances. She hadn’t been able to cry for her father’s death. His terrible suffering and death. Not until her lover had brought her to the point of breakage, collapse. Then she’d clutched at him like a drowning woman, she’d cried, she’d screamed and cried as she hadn’t cried in years. In a delirium she murmured how she loved him, she loved him, a man whose name at that moment she could not have said. Near morning he told her if she wanted to see him again, call him. He gave her the card. He hoped she would call, very much. He’d drive to Rochester to see her. He wouldn’t call her, wouldn’t put pressure on her. He could love her, he said. Hearing these tender, absurd words Vivian bit her lower lip to keep from laughing. But how can I love you, I’m dead inside. I’m a dead woman.

  Now, by day, watching geese fly in formation above the river, seeing scissor-flashes in the choppy waves, she felt differently. It was so simple: her life would take a new turn.

  Vivid, florid, turgid sky.

  “Vivie? You’re listening to this, aren’t you?”

  “No. Yes. I’m sorry, Harvey.”

  “This is hell for me too, Vivie. I could use a drink, too.”

  “It’s too early, Harve. We can’t.”

  Harvey went to fetch them drinks. Splashed Johnnie Walker into two shot glasses. His, he downed smoothly, neatly. Vivian sniffed at hers like a doubtful child.

  “He was so frightened, Vivie. I never expected it of him. He’d say, ‘Don’t tell your mother, I’m losing control of my bladder. Even during the day. I’d be so ashamed if she knew.’ He’d say, grabbing my arm, ‘Harvey, put me out of my misery. You’d do it for a dog.’ ”

  Vivian said quickly, “Harvey, no.”

  “He said, ‘Are you and your sister’—it was like he’d forgotten your name, Vivie—‘waiting for me to go? You’d like that wouldn’t you, you little shit.’ ”

  Vivian wanted to press her hands against her ears. She wanted to slap Harvey’s face and send those prissy glasses flying. “We don’t don’t have to have this conversation, Harvey.”

  “All right, then, Vivie,” Harvey said, adjusting his glasses on his nose, “have it your way. We won’t.”

  The Instructor

  1.

  SHE WOULD LONG remember: she’d taken no notice of him at first.

  Kethy, Arno C. One of thirty-two names on the computer print-out. After the name was an asterisk and at the bottom of the page the asterisk was decoded: Special Student, Night Division. But most of the students enrolled in Composition 101 were in the Night Division of the university. They were all adults; some were conspicuously older than their twenty-seven-year-old instructor E. Schegloff who was a petite, smiling, tense woman looking much younger than her age. Her voice was husky and tremulous. “I realize that my name—Schegloff—” she pronounced it slowly, as a spondee, “—is difficult to pronounce and yet more difficult to spell, but please try. Any reasonable approximation will do.” Was this meant to be humor? A few of the more alert, sociable students in the class laughed appreciatively while the rest sat staring at her.

  Erma Schegloff would wonder afterward, with a stab of chagrin, if Kethy, Arno C., had been one of those staring at her in silence.

  I am not what I appear to be! I am so much more.

  To be a
young woman of hardly more than five feet in height, weighing less than one hundred pounds, is a disadvantage like disfigurement. Erma Schegloff’s size had always seemed to her a rebuke to her ambitions and pretensions. Hadn’t her parents reproached her years ago when she’d told them she hoped to teach You! you’re not strong enough! too shy! used to stammer! She wore leather boots with a medium heel to give her a little height and a little authority. Temporary height and spurious authority but wasn’t that often the case, in civilization? Her face was a striking, sculpted face like a cameo; plain and fierce as that likeness of Emily Dickinson, waif-woman with a secret, implacable will. Erma parted her fine dark wavy hair severely in the center of her head, Dickinson-style, and brushed it back and plaited it into a single thick bristling braid like a pony’s mane thumping between her delicate shoulder blades. Her eyes were large and intelligent and inclined, when she was excited or nervous, to mist over. In the early morning, walking in the cold to the university swimming pool a quarter-mile from her rented apartment, Erma brushed repeatedly at her eyes, which wept without her volition; tears threatened to freeze on her cheeks. She wore no makeup and there were times when her pale skin glowed, or glared, as if she’d been scrubbing it with steel wool to abrade its predominant, feminine features. She had a dread of her male students gazing upon her with sexual interest, or indeed with any interest other than the academic.

  Please respect me! I must succeed with you, I can’t fail.

  Erma Schegloff was a poet, though not writing poetry at the present time, an emotionally complicated time in her life; she was, more practicably, a Renaissance scholar, completing a Ph.D. with a dissertation on seventeenth-century visionary poetry (John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, George Herbert) at the elite main campus of the state university sixty miles away. She’d applied for this modestly paying teaching position because, she told her friends, she needed the money: she was helping to support her aging, ailing parents back in Pennsylvania. She’d wanted to test herself outside the rarified atmosphere of a graduate program of seminars and endless research projects. She’d wanted to become adult.

  That first evening, her voice quavering with drama, Erma read the class list for Composition 101, enunciating the names (and what unusual names) with care; as if she were reading not a miscellany of sounds but a mysterious surrealist poem. She was young and romantic enough to believe it must mean something that these strangers, enrolled seemingly by chance in a remedial writing course, had been assigned to her, E. Schegloff, and would be in her care for twelve weeks. She meant to teach them everything she knew! Brielli, Joseph. DeVega, Alban. Eldridge, E. G. Hampas, Felice. Hasty, Lorett V. As she read off these names she glanced about the room, smiling and nodding as individuals murmured “Here” or “Yes, ma’am” or shyly raised their hands in silence. The classroom was oddly proportioned, wider than it was deep, with a high ceiling of hammered tin peeling pale green paint; antiquated fluorescent tubing hummed, as in a clinical setting; there was a faint hollow echo. Inglas, Sylvan. Jabovli, Nada. Kethy, Arno C. Marmon, Andre. Poak, Simon. Portas, Marta. Prinzler, Carole. And so to the end of the alphabetized list. An incantatory poem! But she’d taken no special notice of Kethy, Arno C.

  Except, several hours later, in her apartment, restless still from the excitement of her first class, Erma began to read through the papers her students had written in response to an impromptu assignment—“Who Am I? A Self-Portrait in Words”—and was stunned by the unknown Kethy’s composition.

  WHO AM I

  First thing is when your on Death Row long enough you don’t ask WHO AM I because you have learnt nobody would be there anyway. And not seeing any face in the mirrer (because there is no mirrer trusted to you) you accept not having a face and so could be anybody.

  I would say I saw you before tonight. Not knowing your name till now. INSTRUCTOR E. SCHEGLOFF. You were a beacon to me. You were shining all that time.

  On Death Row where Id been condemned like an animal I swear the face I would see was yours. Not that long ago—5 weeks, 16 days. You were a sign MISS SCHEGLOFF that my luck would change. There was a lockup thru the facility (Edgarstown) becuse thered been trouble earlier. (Not on Death Row I mean, we were in our cells.) 1 hour of 24 for outdoor exercise.

  Next day a guard took me to Visitors. Hed handcuffed my wrists tight to give pain. They hope for you to beg but I never did. He took me to Visitors. My lawyer was there I had not seen in a long time. Your conviction is overturned he says. I am not even sitting down yet, I tell him God damn I knew I was innocent. I tried to tell you all eight years.

  It was your face E. SCHEGLOFF I beleive I saw in my cell that day. You knew me though I did not (yet) know you. You were saying, Arno dont give up hope. Arno, I am awaiting you. Never give up hope thats a sin.

  But, I did not die. Its absolute truth I was innocent all those years. That was my plea.

  Erma read and reread this composition. Indeed, it didn’t seem like a composition, composed, but a plea from the heart; as if Arno Kethy were in the room with her, speaking to her. She’d begun to breathe quickly. She tried to recall Kethy from class: a smiling youngish black man with a pencil-thin mustache, at the back of the room? Or a blunt-faced Caucasian, in his late thirties, in black T-shirt and soiled work pants, hair in a ponytail? In the last row, by a window? She seemed to recall how when she’d called his name, this man had raised his hand furtively, only a few inches, and quickly lowered it, wordless.

  Kethy had written his self-portrait in a tight, cramped hand on a single sheet of lined tablet paper. His sentences ran out to the edges of the paper. The letters of his words were clearly formed and yet the words were so crowded together, the effect was claustrophobic, crazed. That voice! Erma set the paper aside, shaken.

  How different Kethy was from his fellow students:

  Hello! My name is Carole Prinzler and I am 32 years old. Returning to school now that my youngest is started school (at last) and I have a chance to breathe now and then! My hope is to improve my writing skills and acquire work in Public Relations.

  My name is Dave Spanos, 29 years old. I am a Post Office employee (downtown branch). I am a born resident of this city. I am also enrolled in Intro. to Computers (Wed. night). I am hoping to improve my skills to “upgrade” my statis at the P.O. where I have been selling stamps for 7 years at the counter. Though I enjoy such work, for I like people…

  There was Eldridge, E. G., a round gleaming butterball of a black man in his fifties who wore a suit and tie and gave off a powerful fragrance of cologne. Turning his self-portrait in to Erma, he’d shaken her hand vigorously.

  May I itroduce myself, I am the REVEREND E. G. ELDRIDGE of the Disciples of Jesus Christ. I am a proud resident of this city and of the City of God. I am a father of nine children and eleven grandchildren and a husband of many years. I am blessed with good health and a desire to improve my fellow man. Already you have given us faith, Miss Schegloff, with your opening words that we will write, write, and write like pratising a musical instrument—PRACTISE MAKES PREFERT.

  Erma set these aside, and reread Arno C. Kethy’s composition. What did he mean, he’d seen her face? In his cell? She smiled nervously. But it wasn’t funny, of course. Kethy was serious. (She didn’t want to consider he might be mentally unbalanced.) Why not interpret such extravagant thinking as poetry of a kind? Poetry in prose. A stranger’s anguished yet intimate voice.

  I seem to know him, too.

  She smiled. Her heart was beating quickly. For the spring term she’d rented the cramped, austerely furnished upstairs of a run-down Victorian house near the university hospital grounds; the sound of sirens frequently filled the air, a wild, yearning cry that grew louder and louder and ceased abruptly, like lovers’ cries. To hear, as a neutral observer, is to feel both involved and excluded. Erma wondered at the prospect before her. An unwilling witness to crises she couldn’t control. But her landlady had assured Erma that she’d get used to the sirens—“We all have.”


  That night, she woke repeatedly hearing a man’s yearning voice mixed with the sound of sirens real or imagined. Sitting up, not knowing at first where she was, Erma was panicked that someone might have broken into the apartment. But there was silence. Not even a siren.

  On the door to her three-room apartment, as on the downstairs front door to the house, there was a reassuring Yale lock. And she could bolt her door, too, when she was inside.

  THURSDAY EVENING, her second class, E. Schegloff resisted the impulse to look for Kethy, Arno C.

  E. Schegloff, Instructor. What a mystery that, as soon as she stepped inside the classroom, her nervousness began to lift. Since Tuesday night she’d been anticipating this moment. Too shy! Used to stammer! Remember how you’d cry! But now, in the busyness of the classroom, so many faces, all that faded. Erma knew she had helpful information to impart and she knew, from their self-portraits, that these adults were motivated to learn. They were not adolescents of the kind enrolled as undergraduates in the daytime university. These were adults with responsibilities. They had full-time jobs, and families; some were divorced with children; some were newly naturalized American citizens; a few were retired; a few were mysteriously afflicted (a woman with multiple sclerosis in remission, an ex-Marine “legally blind” in one eye). Their common hope was that Composition 101 taught by E. Schegloff would somehow improve their lives. Erma’s Ph.D. advisor had expressed concern that such elementary teaching would exhaust her and delay the completion of her dissertation; her intelligence and her sensibility were too refined, he feared, for remedial English; she was destined to be a university professor and a poet. Erma had been flattered but unswayed. She’d risked the man’s disapproval by pressing ahead anyway and taking the job, without apology. Years before, Erma’s parents had tried to discourage her from moving to the Midwest, a thousand miles from home, as if such a move were a personal betrayal. (Which possibly, in the secrecy of Erma’s heart, it was.) But Erma was a young woman with a quiet, implacable will. My life is my own. You’ll see!