A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates
“He doesn't know anything about it,” Swan said.
“There's nothing wrong with her—is there?” Clara said.
Swan tapped his fingers impatiently on his desk. Since his mother had come in his room he couldn't leave; that would be a mistake, it would be admitting defeat. She sat on the edge of his bed, her legs crossed at the ankles, as if she owned everything in here, including him. After a moment Swan said, beginning quietly, “You think it's all so simple. You think it's just two animals together and that's that—no, don't interrupt me. I know what you think. But it isn't like that. I don't act with Loretta the way you think and there's nothing wrong with her. I don't do what you think.”
Clara stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“When I was thirteen you told me about girls … and how it would be all right if I, if I …”
“I did?” Clara laughed. “Why did I do that?”
He saw that she did not remember. How had he been able to remember every word and gesture of that conversation while she had forgotten?
“Tell me what I said. I must have made you mad, right?”
“No, you didn't make me mad.”
“But you're mad now? Because you have a girlfriend you have to turn against your mother?”
“I haven't turned against you,” Swan said.
“Look around at me, then. Why do you look so sad? What's wrong?”
“I don't know what's wrong,” Swan said helplessly.
She brushed his hair back from his forehead as if she wanted to see him more clearly. Her fingers were cool and deft. He thought that if she stayed by him, this close, or if Loretta pushed up so perfumy-close against him, he could escape the sense of alarm and depression that was like a puddle of dark water moving steadily toward his feet.
9
But Clark ended up marrying his Rosemary, that birdlike, short little girl with plucked eyebrows and hair dyed black to set off her white, white face, white as flour and just as softly smooth to the touch. To escape Revere's anger he moved out the day he announced his plans, and he and the girl were married a week later. The Revere women and women in Tintern generally began counting months and weeks, staring at Rosemary's trim little stomach whenever they saw her, but nothing happened. Their first baby wasn't born until a year later and by then it was all forgotten and Clark's place with his father was settled: Revere was speaking to him again and he was given a good job, in a few years he might be managing the lumberyard if he did well, but he had been lost forever to the vastness of Revere's schemes and fortunes. He and Rosemary lived in town upstairs in a two-story white frame house, on one of Tintern's better streets.
He began putting on weight along with his wife when she was pregnant, a plump, serious worried young husband. In a year or two he would be able to bring her out to the house, maybe, but in the meantime her family took them in and crowded about them and loved them dearly, as proud of their son-in-law as if he had come down from the mountains to wed Rosemary and had been able to take her back up again.
A week and a day before that wedding, Clark had driven to the railroad depot to pick up a package for Clara. It was a long, heavy thing—another rug from an Eastern import store. He had taken off from work at the lumberyard to get the rug before the depot closed, and he had just enough time to drive by the drugstore to say hello to Rosemary; then he was off on the drive home. It was early April now. He felt a sense of elation that had nothing to do with spring or with Rosemary, whom he loved sweetly and simply and whose petite body seemed to him vastly exciting, but with this package he was bringing home. It was a present, a gift. He was proud of bringing it to Clara, who showed such gratitude and such surprise over everything, though her attention did not last long.
When he got home the old dining room rug had been dragged out. Clara wore jeans and an old shirt; she was barefoot. “God, it looks big,” she said. “You think it's the wrong size?” The dining room furniture had been pushed out into the other room and Clark was a little surprised that Clara had done it all herself. “I want to get it all fixed up for your father. I want to surprise him,” she said.
They struggled with the wrapping around the rug, grunting and sweating. “If Swan was home he could help,” Clara said. But Swan had his own car now and took his time about coming home; and anyway Clark was glad he wasn't around. He felt a sense of possession toward this rock-heavy rug in its awkward packaging, as if it were something he had picked out for Clara himself.
When it was unrolled finally, the rug astonished them with its colors. They felt a little shy before it. “My hands are dirty, I shouldn't touch it,” Clark said. Clara was bent over the rug, staring at it. She bit her lower lip thoughtfully. But Clark, who was embarrassed by beautiful things as if they were an affront to his manhood, broke the silence by saying: “Guess I'll drag all this junk back in.” The “junk” was the old, good furniture that had belonged to Revere's first wife, reclaimed from the attic by Clara. She had discovered that its graceful lines and mellow wood were exactly the kind of thing she had been seeing in her magazines.
Afterward they sat at the dining room table but with their chairs turned around, so that they could look at the rug. They drank beer and talked quietly, aimlessly. Clara sat with her knees hunched up and her bare heels just on the edge of the chair; she kept staring at her new rug and as she did, her lips would turn up slowly into a smile. Clark was oddly pleased. “When you get married I'll help you with your house,” Clara said. “I can tell if things are quality or not.”
“Who says I'm getting married?” Clark said.
“Oh, you. You're a nuisance,” Clara said, waving at him.
After supper Clark drove down the road to a tavern just for fun. Usually he did not go out alone but tonight he felt like doing something different; he was restless. In the tavern he stood at the bar and talked loudly and seriously about politics with the farmers who came in. He could tell that they liked him. He warmed at once to anyone who liked him and his magnanimity sometimes puzzled them; they were not accustomed to such friendliness from a Revere. But they did like him. At about eleven, one of his friends came in, a young man who had been married for maybe five years now, who wasn't doing well and had been avoiding Clark. But in ten minutes they had made everything up, Clark had won the man's friendship again, it was all right. They were both the same age, twenty-five. Tears came into Clark's eyes at the thought of them knowing each other so long. The young man said he had to call his wife to say why he was staying out so late, and Clark went over to the telephone with him. They were both quite drunk. After the man hung up Clark called Rosemary's house. Her mother answered and said she was in bed, was it important? Clark said yes, it was important. When Rosemary came to the phone he told her that he loved her, how was she? Tears had come into his eyes again. When the roadhouse closed he had to drive his friend all the way home because the man had passed out, then he had to drive home by himself, taking the turns as precisely as possible. Sometimes he drove fast, sometimes slow. He did not seem to know what he was doing except when he tried to make a turn then he could tell by a weak queasy sensation in his stomach if he was going too fast. When he got home it was quite late and the house was dark except for the back porch light. He turned off the ignition and sat smiling toward the house. He was too lazy and content to move.
He must have fallen asleep, because he woke up to Clara shaking his head. She had hold of his hair. “Wake up, come on,” she said. She was whispering. “You want your father to know how drunk you are? Drunk like a pig?”
He felt a surge of nausea, then forgot it. He was very sleepy and peaceful. A long gap of time seemed to pass and then Clara jerked him awake again, bent low to hiss something into his face. “I'm O.K.,” Clark muttered. “I can sleep here.…”
“Come on, please. Wake up. You don't want trouble.”
Her hair was loose. She shook him again and strands of her hair flew into his face, stinging and tickling him. Clark did not remembe
“Clark, please—come on,” Clara said.
She took hold of his head and shook it hard. Clark seemed to be working his way up through a heavy, warm pressure of water. He woke suddenly to see Clara bent over him. Behind her was the clear night sky and the moon, just a chunk of the moon, and he wondered why she looked so worried. He reached out and his elbow just brushed the horn—it almost made a sound—and he took hold of her. “Don't be so mad,” he said sleepily. He pressed his face against her. Clara made a noise that might have been a surprised laugh, then she pushed against his forehead with her hand. “You're real nice,” Clark muttered. “Wait—don't—”
He shut his eyes tight and held her. His mind stumbled backward away from this woman standing here in her half-open bathrobe and her bare feet to that earlier, younger Clara who had come home one day with his father. Just a girl. For years he had heard about her and one crazy time he had even gone all the way over to her house, risking everything, that whip of his father's or worse, just to stand by her windows and try to look in.… Now he had hold of her and dreamily, dizzily, he thought that he would never give her up. It seemed to him that he had struggled a long way to get to her.
“You're crazy, let go,” she whispered. Clark pulled her down and tried to kiss her. He felt her hesitating—he was sure of that—and then she dug into his neck with her fingernails. “You son of a bitch, let go! Let go!” she said. Clark fell backward but did not really fall: he was still sitting in the car.
The next morning, before Mandy made up breakfast, Clara called him out into her “garden room.” She was already dressed. Her hair had been pulled back, skinned back, and fastened with pins. On her right hand was the old purple ring she hadn't worn for years. Clark started to tell her how sorry he was, how miserable he was. “Yes,” Clara said. She did not seem to be listening. Nor did she seem to be looking at him, exactly. “What you have to do is get out of here. You know that. You can't stay in the same house with me now.”
“All right,” Clark said.
“You just can't,” she said, and her face, caught in the morning light that flooded the windows, was not the face he had loved and wanted the night before—there were fine feathery lines on her forehead and by her mouth. She was still a beautiful woman but the woman he had wanted was gone now anyway: that young girl Revere had brought home to marry.
“Do you understand?” she said. Her gaze was flattened and remote, like a cat's gaze. Then it sharpened upon him and he could see that she was a little frightened. She tapped at his arm and then let her fingers rest. “I'm sorry you did it. I didn't know—I never— But you can't stay here now. Go and marry her and that's that.”
Clark bent to hear her better. “Marry who?” he said politely.
10
On Swan's eighteenth birthday he rode in with his father to Hamilton, where they met Clara and had dinner at a hotel restaurant. Clara visited the city often, usually staying in a hotel, but this time she was at a relative's house. When Revere asked her what she did she was pleased and vague, explaining she had to shop, had to check out stores, had to see people. It was not clear whom she saw, but Revere did not ask. He distrusted his city relatives; he thought they looked down on him.
Revere had come in for important business—his aunt's estate was being settled. Swan was disturbed by his father's tired, haggard look. The waiters looked at him as if he were an impressive kind of ruin, a man they ought to know but could not quite place. Revere mistook his waiter's solicitousness for something else. “Do they want to hurry us out of here, and we just came in?” he asked Clara.
Swan had no appetite. He had been listening to relatives arguing all day. But he opened his menu and looked at the words, which he tried not to translate into images of food. Clara said, just as he knew she would, “They're having Judd and his wife out to dinner, but not us. I know it.” Swan expelled his breath to show how foolish this idea was; he wanted to stop Clara before she aroused Revere's anger. “They knew it was Steven's birthday but what the hell? Anything they can do to hurt me, they do it.”
“They're busy, it's a lot of work,” Revere said.
He closed his menu. He was over sixty now: a heavy, slack man with sharp bruiselike furrows on either side of his nose. He had a fixed, rather indifferent stare when he did not wear his glasses. Opening his napkin, shaking it out, he glanced down at it as if he had no idea what it was. Then he put it in his lap. They watched him, Swan and Clara, their eyes drawn heavily to him. For a while he said nothing, his face was hard and austere as a mask; then his lips began to tremble. He said, “Don't worry, they'll be sorry. I know how to get back at them.”
“Yes, but you won't,” Clara said.
He shook his head slowly, gravely. Swan felt cold. All afternoon he had had to sit by his father and hear his father's slowed-down, groping voice, his meandering off onto obscure and foolish problems, and he felt exhausted.
He was exhausted all the time now and never could he locate the core of his trouble. When he had still been seeing Loretta he had had these moments of unaccountable, terrifying exhaustion, as if a pair of great wings were pounding against the walls of his brain and had been pounding for so long that everything was going numb, dying. Unfolding his napkin, moving his silverware nervously and needlessly around, he thought of Loretta and wondered what she was doing. What he had last heard about her was nothing surprising—marriage, a baby. Loretta. He kept mixing her up in his mind now with Clark's wife, whom he saw occasionally. But Loretta had been his girl. Narrowing his eyes, he tried to avoid Clara's look and retreated to the secret contemplation of Loretta, who had loved him and had never once been able to talk to him, not once. That last night they had lain together in his car and he had been dizzy with wanting her, a real physical agony he had hardly been able to control, and when she said, “It's all right, Steven,” he had prayed in his mind to God, who he understood did not exist and never had, begging: “Let me just be good and kind. I want to be good. I don't want anything else.” Loretta had drawn him down to her with her arms and her sweet soft mouth. Never had he said the word “love” to her and he had not said it then—but he had almost thought it—and at the nearness of that thought he recoiled from her, trembling. He was terrified of sinking into that swamp with her. He was not going to drown in her body. Because there was no sweet mild world they shared without consequence: they were Swan and Loretta, two real people, and anything he did to her would not dissolve out and away as if in a dream. It would be real. It would involve them together forever.
“You won't hurt me,” she had said.
But it was nothing like what Clara had promised—how strange and simple, how cruel his mother was! You didn't make girls happy in that simple way; they wanted and needed more, and if you couldn't give them anything more?
So he had stayed free of her and he had forced her to become free of him. And Clara had said, hearing it was all over: “Well, I'm just as glad. She was sort of trash anyway, wasn't she?”
Now Clara was shedding the cold haughty look she always wore into stores and restaurants, and as she read the menu a childish, cunning look came onto her face. Swan watched her in fascination. “Oh, this looks good. It isn't too expensive, is it?” she said. She pointed to something and showed it to Revere; he shook his head no, it wasn't too expensive. Swan smiled. He did not know what his smile meant: just the reaction of witnessing rituals, ceremonies that have been repeated many times. Clara always did this. He wondered if she did it with the other men she met here in the city—if she met other men; she was secretive now, in a vague sloppy way— and if they shook their heads, no, in the same way Revere did. When Clara moved her head, slivers of light darted off her diamond earrings. Yes, they were diamond. They weren't rhinestone. But how could most people tell the difference?
That was one of the things that bothered her these days.
“Have anything you want, Clara,” Revere said.
They could relax in the shadow of this man and what he had done for them. Swan tried to think of Revere as his father, his father, and though the idea of Clara being his mother should have been harder for him to accept, still he could not quite understand what it meant to have a father. What did it mean, exactly? How was he to behave toward this man? He imitated any models he came across— he had been imitating and improving upon Clark's style for years— but at the very heart of their relationship was a sense of dry and forlorn emptiness across which father and son might contemplate each other forever. As Swan was more and more able to understand Revere's problems, his role was becoming simpler in one direction and more complex in another. He was turning into a kind of clerk or secretary. Or a kind of lawyer. Already he had spent time with one of his father's new men—his tax accountant—trying to explain to the man why Revere refused to pay certain things and agreeing yes, yes, it was irrational, but how were they going to get it paid without Revere knowing? The older Revere got, the more crucial it was that the game he played not be violated. He demanded to be fooled, lied to, misled. Swan believed that the people who worked with and for him knew this, but if they didn't, he, Swan, knew it and they would have to listen to him. There were certain things one could tell the old man, certain reports one gave him and others one did not. This was getting simpler because all he had to do was transform himself into a kind of machine to master it. But being Revere's only remaining son was getting more difficult. Robert was never mentioned, Jonathan had vanished out of their lives, and Clark was discussed in the way Revere had always discussed obscure relatives who had failed … so that left Swan—Steven—and it wasn't enough just to play chess with the old man and let him win; the old man was getting bored with winning chess. It was becoming necessary to nudge him a little to correct him, before he made a catastrophic blunder and lost everything. Swan thought of how simple everything might be if only his father would die, but the thought was a shameful one.