A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates
She wore a blue wool jumper with a gray kitten made of felt for a pocket. Swan thought he had never seen anything so beautiful.
When he returned to the study hall, however, he felt depressed. He came in and the air seemed to suck at him, eyes lifted to take him in with a mysterious female interest, assessing, pondering— the eyes of girls who bided their time in the public school until they were old enough to quit (at sixteen) or old enough to marry (often at an age younger than sixteen). As he passed her, Loretta gazed at him and he returned her look with a heavy, contemptuous droop of his eyes. Then he was at his seat. Why here, what was he doing? At such times he believed himself an individual in a dream not his own like one of those hapless voyagers of Edgar Allan Poe who made no decisions, were paralyzed to act, as catastrophes erupted around them. The floorboards of this place were worn smooth from generations of footsteps and the cracks between them seemed to be widening every day. Ugly black cracks through which one might slip, fall, never be seen again.
Briefly, the sun appeared. Swan crumpled up a piece of paper and let it fall to the floor into the patch of sunlight.
Stop. You will have to.
It struck him then: he must stop reading, and he must stop thinking. He could lose himself in a female body: Deborah, or Loretta. Though better yet Loretta, who did not know him as a Revere. He was seized with panic as, lifting his eyes, he saw shelves of books he had not read and would never read; the infinity of books he'd seen in the library in Hamilton, in the reference room where he'd dreamed away an afternoon and in other rooms in that building only glimpsed, at a distance. A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn't time for it all and if he couldn't do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct. His teachers spoke to him enthusiastically of college—“You will want to apply to the very best universities, Steven”—but he knew he could not, he would not. He was fearful of leaving Eden Valley and of leaving REVERE FARM. He was fearful of relinquishing all that he'd won in Revere. And he was fearful he would forget the powerful, potent air of Revere's world, those hundreds of acres—no: there were thousands—that were identified as Revere land. If he should relinquish this claim, if he should forget all he'd learned since Clara had brought him here, what then? If he kept reading his mind would burst but if he pushed his books aside, as Jonathan had done, if he rejected the works of the mind, he would never learn all that he needed to learn—for knowledge is power, and he needed power. He remembered Revere pointing out casually the frothy rippling rapids of the Eden River, as they'd crossed the bridge at Hamilton. Power. Dammed-up, to supply power. He smiled, he was not going to be frightened. Yet he felt, between the two impulses, his muscles tense as if preparing him for danger. Unconsciously he dug the tender flesh about his thumbnail until it bled.
At that moment Loretta turned, to smile at him. A flame passing between them.
After class Loretta lingered by her desk until he came by. She lifted her sooty eyes to him and smiled again, insinuatingly. “You don't like to hunt, Steven, do you?”
“No.”
“Not for animals anyway. Right?”
Her sly smile. Her tongue wetting her lips. Swan swallowed hard, understanding that this was the kind of girl Deborah could never be, and the kind of girl he required. That oval, hard, knowing prettiness that could be wiped off with a thumb, smeared. The pale freckled forearms exposed by pushed-up sleeves in a way that was both glamorous and prim. Swan saw his hand reach out and with a startling authority not his he saw his forefinger tap a mother-of-pearl cross the girl wore on a fake-gold chain around her neck.
“Right.”
A few days later Swan crossed the street from the school and entered the diner to buy cigarettes. Did he dare to ask for Old Golds, or would the salesclerk laugh at him? He'd begun smoking to give his nervous hands something to do, but he never smoked at home. Clara would not have cared and Revere would probably not have noticed, but he wanted to keep it secret just the same. He thought that if he was growing up, changing, he would keep it to himself for as long as he could.
The kids who ate in the diner were of a different crowd from those who stayed safe in the close, milky-smelling cafeteria room at school; they were not necessarily older but they were louder, more sure of themselves. Swan liked the crowded smoky atmosphere into which he stepped bringing a flurry of snow in with him. The pneumatic device above the door hissed and the door closed very slowly, so that he had the impulse to pull it shut behind him. A group of high school students stood around the counter, making noise, and all the booths that ran along the front of the diner were filled. There was a floor-stomping, shrieking anonymity here that Swan never felt back in school, where everyone was still named as precisely as they were on the teachers' seating charts; here the country music from the jukebox filled in any gaps there might be in conversations or thought. Swan went to the counter and asked for a package of cigarettes, any brand. He was confused and lonely in this place and would not have been surprised if his classmates—these brassy adults who, in the world of the diner, clearly knew everything important about life—turned to stare contemptuously at him. No one looked.
When he turned, opening the cellophane wrapper, he let his gaze run along the row of booths. Those faces and even the backs of those heads were familiar to him, yet at the same time strange. Was it possible that Swan, who supposed he knew so much and had never had any choice about it, really knew very little? He had always been aware of his classmates but he had never thought seriously about them. Even back in the country school, the boys who tormented him had existed on the periphery of his real life, which was his life at home. He was on a kind of voyage with them but their destinations were far different; when the voyage ended he would get off to go his way and they would go theirs. He had not hated them because he had not thought that much about them. There had been the whole Revere family to keep in his mind: uncles, aunts, cousins, new babies, new wives, the legends of older men now senile or crippled or dead, his own father, his father's father, the table-thumping accounts of spectacular successes that were legal, but not so legal they had no sensational surprise to them. And all that land, so much land, tended and tortured into a garden so complex one might need a lifetime to comprehend it … His classmates had seemed to Swan to whirl about in their own trivial little world that had to do with the friendships and hatreds of one another; that was all. As soon as he had come into Tintern in eighth grade he had been aware of a central group in his class—an amorphous but unmistakable unit of boys and girls who seemed omnipotent in their power. They had only the power to give or deny friendship, to include or exclude, and Swan had not cared about that. He had not cared. Though he had no interest in them he had been overhearing for years the tales of their weekend and after-school exploits, their parties and hayrides and wild night-riding out on the highway, and, as time went on, their romantic alliances and feuds that marked them as adult, mysterious. He thought their bright clothes and loud voices drab enough, trivial as the high school classes they all disliked, but he could not help admiring something about them— their blindness, maybe? Their complacence?
He was crossing the street and heading back toward school when he heard someone behind him. “Steven?” she said. Loretta was hurrying toward him, her head ducked. She wore a bright blue kerchief to protect her hair from the snow. Swan saw how her hair bunched out and made the kerchief puffed and bouncy; a lot of work had gone into that hair. The windows of the diner behind her were steamy; above her head a big sign ran the length of the building, cracked and peeling. CROSSROADS LUNCHEONETTE—TRUCK STOP— DRINK COCA-COLA. Swan had never looked at that sign before.
“If you're going back I'll walk with you,” she said.
They walked along. Swan lit his cigarette and then offered her one. He
“I s'pose they're laughing at us back there,” she said, alluding casually and with brittle humor to something Swan was expected to know about. “But I really have to get back early. I really do.” They walked along self-consciously. Loretta wore drab little boots with gray fur on top that looked like cotton; it was thick and had separated into bunches. Her coat was plaid, blue and yellow. Cheap. Everything about her was cheap. Swan felt sorry for her but at the same time knew that in the high school world he had to enter every day she was superior to him—not only a year older, but superior because she “knew” things he didn't; she ran around with the right people while Swan, Steven Revere from up the valley, ran around with no one. He shivered, thinking of her as she had been that day in the library, her dark glossy hair falling over her shoulder and swinging free.… He had always been aware of Loretta but had not bothered to truly look at her, just as he had been aware of all his classmates. Somewhere inside his brain, stored away with other useless, foolish knowledge, were faithful records of all their alliances and loves, going back to the eighth grade passions that were expressed by scribbled notes and inked initials on the backs of hands.
“I didn't see you in there when I went in,” Swan said, as if he had been looking for her.
“Well, I saw you come in. I didn't know you smoked.”
He had no answer to that. They were walking up the driveway to the school—cracked pavement with crumpled-up papers and junk in its gutters. The air was very wet and not cold. Neither Swan nor Loretta dared to look at each other, but were fascinated by everything around them. Swan said, pointing to one of the orange-yellow buses parked forlornly out in the lot, “That's the bus I take.” Loretta nodded with interest. He was aware of her beside him, the silhouette of her head. She was several inches shorter than he. The girls who were loudest, most confident, who had bright red lips that might say any word and show no shame, always turned out to be short and modestly proportioned. Swan shivered again and was so nervous he had to keep wiping snowflakes out of his eyes just for something to do. They were so vivid and real, he and this girl. It was not a bright day, but the sullen air glared about them, setting them apart and dissolving everything else back from them—the school building with its gray concrete blocks, the withered evergreens at the corners of the school. Even their voices sounded harsh and loud. A whisper would have carried everywhere, to every corner of the school, Swan thought. He had no idea what to do with this girl, who seemed to be pushing against him—even when she was several discreet feet away—and offering her face up to him, her big penciled eyes and face caked with pink-toned makeup. He did not know the style of language and behavior the other boys knew instinctively. He did not know what to say or do and the knowledge of his stupidity depressed him.
After they had been having lunch together in the diner for a few weeks, they idled by her locker one day—the old locker tumbling and crowded with books, papers, old scarves, tissues, a mirror with a yellow plastic frame, and her sweater and coat—he tried to talk with her as he would have talked with Deborah. He told her of his nervousness, his need to smoke. As he talked with her, leaning in with one arm up over her head in the classic pose all his classmates used and which he was consciously imitating, he tapped lightly on the thin metal of the locker with his fingertips. Loretta smiled as if he had begun to tell a joke or a complicated story. He went on, uncertainly, to say that he did not think his father would like her because he didn't like Clark's girl Rosemary, and she was something like Rosemary; and at last she began to listen, her eyes getting keen and sharp. He thought the irises were like tiny pebbles, like pellets. “So what are you saying?” she said, standing back flat on her heels. The sockets of her eyes were fiercely shadowed by the dimness of the hall. Swan understood then that he could not talk to her and if he tried he would only disturb her. He could not talk to his mother either, and of course not to his father, and never to Clark and never to his teachers, and it made sense that he could not now talk to Loretta, who walked so close to him and smiled dazzlingly up into his face as if these gestures of intimacy had nothing at all to do with Swan himself and his problems, but were just conventional gestures everyone used. As soon as he understood this he was all right. He was even relieved. When he encountered Deborah he could say things to her, certain things, and she understood, even if she offered him no friendliness and certainly no intimacy. But Loretta was another person.
“Nothing, I'm sorry,” he said.
“I know your father's a big deal, so what? You trying to tell me something?”
“I said it was nothing. Forget it.”
He had caught on to something arch but at the same time pliant in her—her edginess could always be caressed into softness if the caress had a harsh enough sound to it.
Loretta lived half a mile away and he could never walk her home because he had to catch the school bus. He felt juvenile and degraded by this fact, but Loretta did not seem to mind. She stood out back with him in the crowd of kids from the “country”—which could mean anything from the scrubby lower section where families lived fifteen to a shanty, to the vast rich farms of the Reveres off to the north of Tintern—and she cradled her books against her chest, standing with her back straight and her shoulders ready to shrug up in a coquettish gesture, while Swan smiled down into her pretty, ordinary little face and felt somehow illuminated by her presence, made special, important. He could not understand why she liked him. He could not understand why she had singled him out, abandoning some other boy or boys in favor of him, and he had abdicated to her the complete privilege of choice—it would never have occurred to him to turn to another, more intelligent girl. He would never be able to approach his cousin Deborah with the casualness he approached this Loretta, whom he scarcely knew even after weeks of lunches and huddled talks, though he felt that he knew Deborah thoroughly and that knowing her was like coming across a splinter of himself. But he could touch Loretta and slide his arm around her; in the precarious safety of an emptied stairway he could kiss her; he could bump his nervous forehead against hers secure with the knowledge that she knew how to do this: she was smiling and conspiratorial, she was never embarrassed.
They met out in the corridor during classes, each asking to be excused at the same time and exhilarated with the idea of such fraud, such daring—seeing her come shyly out of a classroom down the hall made Swan wonder dizzily who he was to have such power. He led her down the back stairway past the double doors to the cafeteria and past the first floor (there were no classrooms at the rear of the first floor) and down the basement, the last flight of stairs absolutely forbidden to all students and generally of no interest to them—where, in a dim alcove under the stairs, surrounded by the mysterious comforting hum of machinery and the permanent odor of food from the cafeteria, they could stand pressing against each other, kissing, and Swan felt so strongly how nice she was—he could think of no other word—that he had to keep telling her, telling her. He felt that they drifted out from themselves, from Swan and Loretta, into a sweet mild anonymous world where there was only the gentleness and kindliness of affection, simple affection. He felt how easy it was to be good and how intoxicating this girl's warmth, which was never a threat to him, asked nothing of him but only wanted to give; he wondered if the men who had come to Clara's arms had discovered this sweet entrancing silence and if all men discovered it sooner or later.
Some months later, when Clara tried to talk to Swan about her, he was uneasy and avoided her eyes.
“But why, what's wrong?” she said. He thought her too eager, too simple. What business was it of hers that he had a girlfriend? That he had turned out to be less freakish than everyone suspected should not have surprised h
“I'm not interested in Clark's opinion of her,” Swan said.
“But Clark says she's nice. Why don't you look at me? There's nothing to be ashamed about.”
He flinched as if she had struck him.
“A boy your age should have a girlfriend, there's nothing wrong with it. Why don't you want me to tell your father? Clark always went out with lots of girls, even Jonathan did—I guess—and it didn't mean they were going to marry them. All your father is afraid of is you or Clark marrying someone below you, that's all, but he knows how it—”