Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Father took me down to work with him. He had his own office, and there was a hallway of smaller offices that were “under him.” He had his own pert, cute little clipped-haired secretary, so much more pleasant than Nada that it was painful to see. He was a vice-president of some kind, I have yet to explain. I don't know what he did though he explained it to me several times that day. He showed me his company's product, a strand of very thin, nearly invisible wire that glowed in the light from the window behind him. (This company was GKS, I think. Before this he worked for OOP, and afterward for BWK.) Oh, he was a fine giant of a man still, with his hair grown a little thin on one side of his head but thick on the other, and one shoulder maybe sinking a little more than ever toward the earth, and his suit was rumpled and twitching with good humor, and the tip of the white handkerchief in his breast pocket was drooping, and one of his socks was royal blue and the other navy blue, and his teeth looked stained, for when Nada left us ordinary sanitation measures were suspended, and as he held the wire up for me to see, his big thick fingers were trembling. We were grim and happy together, like two bachelors. Sometimes I caught him glancing at me as if thinking, Who is this scrawny little bastard I'm stuck with? But then he would smile like a large Boy Scout and offer me some Sweet Peach chewing gum, which he carried around all the time, to give to office girls and all the other simple, eager-to-please souls of the sort that swarmed in the part of the world he controlled.

  Here he had a handsome, broad desk cluttered with things that looked important, and a buzzer system, a few telephones, many loose plastic pens, a letter opener of brass, a paperweight of heavy purplish stone, anything one might want in an office. At home he had nothing. Here the other men and the office girls smiled at him and knew who he was; at home there was no one to smile, and anyway he was nothing. But he was a brave comrade for me in those days, allowing me to skip school, as if Nada's escape were a kind of holiday, and I want to record how good he was to me up until the time he too cracked.

  This happened one evening after we came home from a bowling alley. We were both lousy bowlers, and I think that might have precipitated his breakdown. Father was the sort of man who cannot bear to be outdone at anything. I had heard about him from boys at Johns Behemoth whose fathers knew him, or who had friends who knew him, and the rumor was that Elwood Everett admired men like himself, young men, who did everything he had done at that age except for the one final fatal step that suggested they were perhaps equal to him—then the game was over. This was a joke among people who knew, but Father never knew, thinking himself broad-minded and fair as any American. The fist-striking, back-slapping, ale-drinking bowlers at the Oak Woods bowling lanes we went to got on his nerves, not because of their lower-class happiness, but because of the way their pins crashed and flew and fell, rolling helplessly at the back of the alleys, like creatures fallen with side-splitting laughter. Ah, we both hated those men!

  And he kept ducking back into the sleazy bar off the alleys while I bravely plodded around in my too-large and ludicrously stiff bowling shoes, carrying my too-heavy bowling ball balanced against my chest, so that on the way home his driving was extravagant and caused people to honk their horns at him. All this got him into the mood, but it wasn't until he had downed a glass of some special Irish whisky that he began to blubber.

  Have you ever seen a large man blubber? Well, perhaps blubbering always indicates large men; small men whimper, I suppose. I'm large now myself, and I blubber every night and sometimes while I write this memoir, when a word or two releases in me whole floods of salty tears. Father did indeed blubber, wiping his nose on the edge of his forefinger, but he did more than that—goddam him, excuse him, forgive him—he began to talk.

  “Now, Dickie, your mother is unstable. We know that. We are rational about that, we understand,” he began. He was looking at me man to man; nothing terrifies a boy more. “But we are human beings too, yes, we are human, and human beings can't always control themselves. Look, I'm not ashamed of crying. Don't be embarrassed, Son. I'm not ashamed and don't you be ashamed. I'm an honest man. I have nothing to hide.”

  He poured himself more whisky and seemed about to offer me some, then remembered who I was. “We want to understand her sickness and forgive her and make her well, Dickie, my poor kid, but it's awful hard when she's such a … she's such a bitch, why hide it? Everybody knows it, why hide it?” He laughed. His laughter at such times was bearlike and wheezing. “Women in this country, Dickie, this good old America, are all trying to be like Natashya, and Natashya has succeeded, oh yes, she has succeeded, she has everything she wants and then doesn't want it, she doesn't know what she wants, she never does any work—good sweet Jesus, never, never!—even though she was living in a room with a hotplate and cockroaches when I found her, but you won't hear about that! Bebe and Mimi and Fifi and Tia and all the girls won't hear about that, and you can bet your ass that Dean what's-his-name, that fairy with the English accent, you can bet he won't hear about it, that phony son-of-a-bitch with his phony vocabulary! Aggrandizement, he said the other night—what the hell kind of talk is that? He pulled it out of the air! And talking about some poem to Lesbia—what the hell kind of talk is that with women present? Those intellectual bastards always get onto things like that. Their minds are filthy, and it comes out disguised as a joke. Where I come from, Buster, you don't joke about serious things like that, anyway not with women around, and I'll warm your skinny little ass if I ever hear you talking smart. You understand? One of us is going to teach you some manners and it won't be your bitch of a mother, that's for goddam sure—

  “Now, look. Look. Sit still. I want to tell you how things are, I want to make it all clear and aboveboard,” he said, sobbing again so his nose began to run, and I sat in an agony of terror at what he might say. “One of us is going to tell the truth! Oh, not her—not her! Fancy little Natashya with one hand in my pocket and the other inside my trousers—not her, she won't tell it, but I will! I don't lie! All your life you can look back on this talk and think how your daddy told you the awful truth, no matter how it hurt him, and how your mother wouldn't give you the time of day if you were drowning in the bathtub, and you remember that—

  “What's wrong, where are you going? Sit down. Sit still. It all began when she was going to have a baby, and that baby was you,” he said, slowing a moment to get his bearings and bending over me with one arm out behind me along the back of the sofa and the other extended, his big fingers closed about the glass. “Yes, that baby was you! Jimmy— I mean Dickie—what the hell am I saying? Jimmy's my kid brother, he's forty now, how's that for a scream? My kid brother is forty! No, you're Dickie—Dickie—that baby was you. Now you know where babies come from, don't you? They teach it in school now or somewhere, so you know… Stop crying for Chrissake, I'm not going to hit you, you think I'm like your mother? Shut up that crying! It started with her pregnant, and maybe she wanted to flit around a little more and blush over the compliments she got for her ass, or her stories, or both—you know her!—and she started acting nuts right then, a lovely young girl of twenty and already cracking up, selfish like an oyster you can't pry open and the only way you can get it to recognize you is to smash it against the wall! Well, she was pregnant and stayed out late, sitting around brooding in the park and maybe picking up stray niggers that wouldn't object to a round back in the bushes, even with a nut that wouldn't wear stockings to her own wedding until I said to her, What the hell are you pulling? What the hell? Just what the hell? So she knuckled under and wore them no matter how hot it was that day, and that was that, but then when she got pregnant she went nuts again and said how she wanted to have an abortion and stayed away in some goddam hotel and had the doctor all lined up—

  “What? No, sit still, the bathroom can wait. You can go to the bathroom all night long when I get through! She had the doctor all lined up, Dickie-boy and it was a matter of money, and she called me up and started screaming over the phone and calling me every filthy name sh
e knew that the niggers or somebody taught her, maybe those fake Russians that were crawling all over New York and trying to write poetry—they think they're so much better than the Reds but I say shit, at least the Reds stayed over on their side of the ocean and that's more than all those goddam other immigrants are doing, and I don't exclude those spies and crud coming up and landing in New York, and it's the same way in England, don't worry! Same goddam mess! And then she called me up next morning and said no, she didn't want the abortion, and she talked about it the way you talk about buying a new car, you think you should wait until fall to economize, then she changed her mind again and said she did want it, she couldn't live with me and couldn't have any kid of mine—but she could have some nigger or spic or Jew kid, I suppose, I wouldn't doubt that, she's balled more Jews, Dickie-boy than I have blackballed in my clubs, and I kid you not. But listen,” he said, his voice breaking, “listen. She's run out again and it's just us and we gotta stick together, what if she doesn't come back? What if she doesn't come back? We gotta forgive her, she can't help it if she's a bitch and her father or somebody was nuts. We gotta forgive her and understand and …”

  And he waddled his big buttocks over across the cushion to me and lowered his face onto my shoulder, weeping. He snuffled and bellowed and the whisky glass tilted so that whisky ran onto my leg and down inside my shoe, and I didn't care, I just sat there waiting for it to be over so that I could sleep. Even the nausea in my stomach was pressed down by this paralyzing heaviness that came over me, and I thought, Thank God I'm going to die. Thank God I won't be alive after this.

  28

  I stayed in that languorous trance for a few days. Then, on my birthday, I had enough foresight to ask Farley Weatherun if I could visit with him overnight, since Father would take me out to a restaurant and for dessert a simpering waitress would bring a cake adorned with a giant sparkler to our table, and I wasn't up to it, not quite up to it. So Farley said sure, why not, though it was a little strange because we weren't especially good friends, and we were fooling around with a few other kids in the dormitory when a gay, floating sensation rose in me and buoyed up my heart and I told them excuse me, I'd be back in a minute, and ran down the corridor and outside without bothering with my coat.

  Intoxicated, serene, and mindlessly happy, I floated across the campus, and no stares or glares caught my eye, neither from bemused after-dinner-tramping instructors nor my classmates, so accustomed to nuts. We were brilliant, we Johns Behemoth brats, but we were nuts, and why hide it? But there are nuts and nuts, just as there are mothers and mothers, and far better to be a serene nut than one who overturns tables. Oh, what did I have in mind when I ran out? Not a little was I buoyed along the walks by a pleasant thought having to do with how I could get her back, or how I could discover why she had left—what was lacking in me—how I could amend it, humbly and with slicked-down hair, a good kid, just a good kid trying to survive, preloboto-mized and prepubescent!

  Now I beseech the fates to visit me once more with that eerie happiness, that dazzle of nutty chaste innocence that flooded my body on that day, seven-thirty on a March Wednesday, my eleventh birthday and first deathday! I beseech the fates, the saints, Christ, and God Himself in his gold foil robes to electrify my flabby waste of a body with the glow of that fire! I swear to you, my readers, that I was at last coming alive, and I had been in a trance for many days. Do you know what it is to be sleeping and yet awake, awake and yet sleeping? How you can't shake it off, can't quite open your eyes? My God, nothing is more terrifying! I had sunk into that kind of stupor listening to them argue, through the laundry chute, and rose temporarily out of it only to ebb back again when Nada tried to smooth out my sheet with her hand and told me everything I expected, and then I had sunk heavily into it when Father wept on my shoulder and told me … what he had told me—I won't go into that again (words on lavatory walls are poetry compared to Father's man-to-man combat), and now I was coming out of it again because—do you see?—it seemed to me I was going to find out an answer at last.

  I vaulted up the steps of the Main Building but everything was dark. Did I let that stop me? No more than temporarily! I vaulted over the side of the little brick wall and ran around the corner, on the path that said DELIVERYMEN USE THIS ENTRANCE and that was off-limits for us scholars. The back door was locked and darkened too, but without hesitating, in my warming, dazed excitement, I tapped at the window-pane with my gnawed knuckle and it broke like magic, shattering down upon me. I brushed everything aside, splinters, slivers, tears (was I crying?), and crawled through the window, severing a small vein in my leg but never mind, never mind. Once inside, I ran along the dark corridor and even sped past my destination, braking suddenly and skidding into a porcelain drinking fountain, but whirling about, and there it was—the Records Room, the sanctuary where so many secrets lay entombed about us Johns Behemoth boys and we powerless to know them. I got inside this room too, somehow, though the transom atop the door was rusty and cranky, and the blood that came from somewhere was slippery as hell, and once down inside the room I threw on with a triumphant flick of my wrist a whole galaxy of flickering, shivering fluorescent lights, and there it was! A wall of filing cabinets! This was heaven itself! My heart was pounding with excitement as if I were about to witness a vision. I ran, slipping and sliding, to the drawers and groped around looking for “E,” unable to find it for an agonizing few seconds, until I remembered sharply that “E” was near the beginning of what was called the alphabet. I yanked out the big drawer and pawed through the manila folders, panting, gasping, and when I found “Everett” a cloud seemed to pass over my mind and I was quite mad with happiness, but only for an instant. Then I yanked it out. I slashed through the papers—papers of graphs and numbers that looked like the exam I had taken, and there was my pathetic medical report, filled out by an indifferent quack who charged Nada sixty dollars, and my five letters of recommendation from former teachers, gibbering with enthusiasm no doubt, but I hadn't any time for them, and finally I found what I wanted. It was the IQ^score. There were two papers and one said 153 and the other, dated more recently, said 161. I stared from one paper to the other until it dawned upon me what those numbers meant.

  Then the hot kernel of fire burst in my stomach and I began to sob. I sobbed with rage. What did she want from me then? What more could she want? I couldn't do any better. I had even pushed myself beyond what I could do, and still it wasn't enough for her—I wasn't enough for her—and what else could I do? I tore the papers in pieces. I picked the rest of the folder up from the floor and tore it, and I yanked out the drawer so that it fell and struck my leg (later a great black-and-orange bruise was to appear, big as a grapefruit, on my thigh), and suddenly there were folders everywhere, flying in the air, being torn, struck, ground underfoot, and I picked up a stool and sent it crashing into the flickering fluorescent tubing overhead with a strength I didn't know I had, and I swear to you—yes, I formally swear—that never in my life until that moment had I truly been alive! Never!

  Now every cell and tube was throbbing with a joy that had no humor, was beyond humor, and my bones creaked, so much was demanded of them, and the little muscle in the center of me, my delicate, wheezing heart, swelled like any fine organ to take on this challenge and sent blood pumping to all nooks and corners of my body! It was wonderful! Wonderful! I yanked more drawers out, I skidded on the papers, I crashed sideways into someone's desk and turned my rage to it, my fingers groping in a drawer and seizing a jar of ink that crashed against the wall not a half-second later, and the splattered droplets mingled with my hot, happy tears, and by the time they came for me I had thought of something further, the best and happiest trick of all: I was vomiting over everything, summoning up from my depths the most vile streams of fluid that had ever graced any Record Room in history.

  29

  That was the end of Johns Behemoth for me, and it got back to me from Gustave, via his mother, via the Spoons, from the very mouth of Dean Nas
h himself, that he had always had reservations about the Everetts, all of them. The cultural background was spotty, irregular, Bohemian when it wasn't just plain Philistine, the emotional maturation levels of both child and parents were clearly low, and Johns Behemoth would never again lower its standards out of a desire to accommodate someone's pleas. No, never! And Gustave imitated the way our good dean must surely have pursed and stretched down his lips and tilted his nose up as if to get a whiff of fresh aristocratic air unbesmirched by the stink of vomit that seemed always about me.

  1

  My body tingled for a few days, then I heard a high uncertain buzzing in my ears, then the tingling faded away and the buzzing disappeared as if someone had pulled out my plug.

  I remember crying against Father's shirt front and feeling his big loving hands on me, patting my back. He forgave me. And now we had a new maid named Florence, who supposedly knew nothing of our troubles, and she said I was her good boy, her good, good boy, and her voice was always raspy and sincere. People came to visit—not me but Father, who needed visits—and I overheard Mavis Grisell and Tia Bell and Charles Spoon and the Griggses and Bebe and everyone tell Father to drop in for cocktails soon, and if he had to leave town they'd be glad to take in Richard (me) for a few days, and above all he shouldn't worry. Things would turn out in the end. After that we didn't hear from them anymore.