New Jersey Noir by Joyce Carol Oates
Still wary of the subject of alcohol, I decided to keep my verb tense in the present and stick to a positive note in my voice, and I said, “I’ve always thought that considering the things he’s been through, overall he’s done a pretty good job of staying optimistic.”
“Not always.”
I raised my eyebrows expectantly.
“Like everyone, good days, bad days. On the bad, all we think about is the bad.”
Fury or perhaps a sense of self-righteousness had helped iron out her speech. Her stutter subsided. She shook her head irritably and looked out, the Addams Family having pushed on in search of other fun. The brick behemoth—a dilapidated casino, as it turned out—was covered in graffiti and most of its massive windows had been boarded up. But seagulls, their shrieks penetrating our window, had found exposed panes broken by kids’ thrown rocks, and they would alight on the sharp edges of glass, then pick and push their suddenly shrinking bulks through. Note to writerly but currently creatively fallow self: a metaphor for increasingly tightened but still ultimately porous U.S. borders?
“What I meant was, no one wants to be miserable. And lest we forget,” I went on, thinking darker thoughts than my tense and tone were letting on, and grimacing and trying to make it look jolly, “Scott does have that marvelous sense of humor …”
It had been years since Scott had made me laugh more than a jaundiced, withered snicker. But back when we were still pals—me the arch sorcerer to his eager apprentice, or so he claimed—from his end of the line he could parody Updike in a paean to his dinner of pork and beans, eroticizing it and stringing out his sentence to make himself sound aswim in a sauce of small-town recollections. “That deserves another shot of Elijah,” he’d say.
Dita seemed to be daydreaming, resting her chin on her palm, her elbow propped on the edge of the table, and I said, trying to feel her out and see if her deepest fears were matching mine, “You’d be a better judge of it, of course, so do you think Asbury Park has been more or less good for him? Was he writing, last time you talked to him?”
“Hmm, he likes it here,” she said more cheerfully. “He comes from St. Louis, as you know. He likes being near the Atlantic. He was claustrophobic in—ih—ih—in—”
“Missouri,” I said.
“I always want to say Mississippi. What do they call them, the fly—flyyy—”
“You mean the flyover states …”
She ground out more laughter and nodded. “Yes, what I meant. But not nice to say! I’ve never been home with him. I have never wanted to go. Since we’re together, Scott has only returned to St. Louis twice. And every time he leaves, he drags his feet to the airport—because really, those people! Horrible! His family, I’m talking about, see.”
“I’ve never gotten the whole story,” I said, but what I meant was the true story, as Scott had always been something of a mythographer, I was sure, exaggerating almost to a gothic degree his bad childhood. There were parts of the memoir I’d winced at. My own narratives had gotten more confessional and autobiographical in inverse proportion to the steep plunge of my reputation. I did believe that when he was fourteen he’d tried to burn his house down and been sent to a mental institute. The details of the group sessions and cigarettes, stale coffee and bullying psychologists, were admirably vivid; the Mexican girl he’d met in there made for great characterization and story value. But the cruelty and the tyranny of the father, the weakness and boozy, unremittingly ironical seductiveness of the slushy mother—the Quaker and the feminist in me had revolted. Still, he’d brought it off in the end: the dramatic running-away, a mite-bit too prison-break flick for me, had led to a lovely, lyrical, often comic sequence, in which he hitches rides with truckers to the East Coast, which felt too original to make up. And when in the epilogue Scott is busking in Washington Square and he meets his future wife, a Japanese tourist, and the two decide to take the Staten Island Ferry together for no particular reason, I bawled out loud—ashamed of myself in my cozy Claremont Avenue apartment for not having believed in the skewed earlier portraits. That’s talent too. From my jaded, thoroughly writersconferenced point of view, I’d known better writers to forge more outlandish poetic licenses for themselves. And anyway, given the chance I might take the fractional germ of truth in those Dickensgrade parents over the father who’d herded us with silence and a mother countering with too much praise, and let it sprout into a doorstop that would rival Jane Eyre for gloom and recrimination. “What you have,” I’d told him, “is the basic wad of pie dough you’ll be able to use for all kinds of inventions, with scraps left over for tea biscuits.” I’d then had to explain to him the reference, what grandmothers made on rainy summer days with their little darlings. To hear Scott tell it, blinking above a pinched smile, he’d never had the luxury of knowing any of his grandparents, not since he was two or three. His folks had been too greedy and jealous to share any kind of love with him, but thanks anyway, Teach. How I’d wanted to wipe that satisfied and assuredly abject smirk off his face, and show him love. After that, he’d satirically sign off in phone messages as Pie Dough Boy.
Of course, it was the kind of memory best not shared with Dita, and as it fired its way through my emotions during those fifteen seconds of silence while the waitress dropped the menus in front of us, I smiled wistfully and said, “It must have been hard for him.”
“I made him go,” said Dita, which considering the guilt trip my head was putting itself through, and from which I was just returning, I misheard to imply that she’d driven him away. “He just drags his feet whenever he has to leave,” she added, nodding over the menu, “my little boy! But anyhow, you know what’s good here? The pasta primavera.”
Her look sizzled with delectation and then she slipped her half-moon readers on, a little too comfortably I thought. “I’ll take it,” I hooted, “something light for a change.”
Getting that call from Dita, I’d thought: He’s finally done it. Scott had attempted suicide a number of times and threatened it even more. He had the gradually fading scars on his wrists to prove it, and used them, eyes twinkling lightheartedly (if disingenuously, my uncharitable side whispered), as a springboard for talking about “next time.” He was a suicide-ideation junkie, an old shrink of mine might have said. Once or twice I’d gotten quiet during these felicitous warnings, something I’d learned not to do (neither the going-along-with-it-with-drawn-breath-protest-of-shock), because he’d gone hot and savage on me: “You’ve never really taken me seriously. You know what you are? Envious, man.”
Dita and I put in our matching orders, and when the bread came around I grabbed for a piece from the basket, saying, “Whom have you contacted?”
The usual. She’d filed a missing persons report, gone around to her neighbors and asked if any of them had seen Scott lately and when they believed was the last time.
“Scott was friendly to everyone he saw on our street and in our neighborhood, but the thing I kept hearing from them was that even though he’d say hello he would never be the one to start up a conversation. Some said they had no idea who I was talking about.”
Did this surprise her? I didn’t ask. She talked on, not yet touching the bread.
“Well,” she said, “someone who prefers to live in a basement—I guess you knew all that—when there are two whole floors with better light, more comfortable space, and he was the one who did the changes and refurbishing, all by himself—for months!”
I remembered Scott’s excitement, infectious I’d felt it to be, when he told me how much he liked swinging a hammer and swashing a paintbrush up and down walls. “And I’m good at it,” he’d said, “ha ha! Guess I missed my calling, guess I should change my direction before it’s too late, don’t you think? Because this is really a lot of fucking fun!”
And I remembered how cautiously I’d stepped out of the way of a trap set to snare me, so he could hold me down while accusing me of more envy and disloyalty.
“Just don’t get too comfortable with i
“The floors are original,” Dita said, now reaching for the smallest piece of bread, “but Scott did have a friend show him how to sand them down and polyurethane them. I think they did it together, and he was proud.” She pursed her lips and pushed them out in a puffy pout I’d seen as a gesture of deflationary equivocation in Prague and Krakow, the default mode for people who’d learned not to expect much from life before getting, some of them, more than they’d ever dreamed of having, then judging it not quite up to snuff.
She shrugged one shoulder and considered tasting the bread.
“I bought it as an investment and a weekend retreat, but I had no idea Scott would take to it so po-po-po-ssessively. Ah—and all the bathroom and kitchen fixtures are new. That we had to contract out. The house was entirely insulated to begin with. The furnace was already good, thank God—I didn’t have to replace that. But yes, Scott was proud, as he should be. Together we selected nice colors, but he did all of the painting himself. He did a good job. I didn’t expect him to move in permanently, but it did happen gradually. No chance, however, of renting it out in the summer when I’m in Europe with my mom.”
I would have caught on the detail of Scott’s having a friend to help him with the floors if I wasn’t focusing so intently on the fact that she was speaking so openly about her investment. Scott himself had been given to get-rich-quick schemes. Having given up hopes of ever appearing on Oprah with another memoir detailing his poor New York years and the disaster of his marriage to the girl from Osaka, who’d slept around, he had decided to embark on a series of kitty detective stories for young readers. Just listening to his plans for that ultimately foundered project was enough to make me quit picking up the phone. He could go on for hours about the police cat (an item he’d found in the local newspaper) that went “undercover” posing as an ordinary household pet to help unmask a fraudulent vet in the area who’d been putting animals to sleep for supposed diseases they didn’t have and collecting the absurdly high medical fees from distraught owners eager to do the compassionate thing. I didn’t stop to ask if he thought the topic right for his target audience and he never solicited my feedback. He’d quit doing that a long time ago.
Another thing I wasn’t sharing with Dita was my knowledge of his wild obsessive loves for very strange-sounding women he met on the streets. It was proof of just how desperate the housewives of New Jersey must be, and how lamentably short the town was on presentable men, that Scott—reeking of cigarettes, face haggard from sleepless nights and overwrought, overpowering emotions, his body skinny and shaking from narcissistic dieting as well as all of the wildly alternating years of booze and sobriety—could seduce almost any female he met on his rare sorties out of his cave.
Dita and I ate our primaveras in virtual silence—the lunch crowd had swelled and in response the management had turned up the music—and for once I was grateful for the pop I abhorred. Every third song, as she indicated, was by local hero Bruce Springsteen. (I’d become a shut-in with my lone Bach Sunday brunches and my loud, Bayreuth-of-one evenings, my fully loaded CD player machine-gunning nightly through the Ring Cycle.)
“Just over there!” Dita shouted, pointing with her fork across my shoulder.
“What?!”
“The Stone Pony,” she said, careful to enunciate, “where Springsteen started!”
I turned and saw on the other side of Ocean Avenue a modest white cement-block nightclub, and turned back at her grinning gamely. “Did Scott love Bruce Springsteen?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, not tripping over my shift into past tense. “Sometimes I think that’s why he insisted we move to Asbury … I would almost even say he was in love!”
My sweet, dopey grin curdled into something more tart. “I had no idea!”
“Oh, yes!”
I tried listening to some of the lyrics he was warbling and wailing. I had no idea what he was singing. The transience of idols, I thought, maybe not as transient as human lives. I had no idea what we were doing here—we were getting nothing done, not saying anything to curtail Scott’s plight. Neither of us was enjoying ourselves, yet I bobbed my head along to the horn-rich rhythm, as though I were back in a seedy bar on Fire Island in the ’60s, dancing to race music with other sweater queens amid the required smattering of lesbians whose presence kept the place from getting raided. I wanted a glass of pinot noir, or something inky and gagging, a Bordeaux—I wouldn’t give Dita the satisfaction.
“Catchy words,” I said, imagining a double bourbon on the rocks. There was no reason not to have one. Soon we would hear that the body had been recovered—and I’d never have to look at this woman again or hear her scratchy words seeking out vulnerable places, the soft bruises from nighttime bumps in my bathroom, to grind their way into my flesh forever. I pointed up, saying, “I guess it’s not for nothing that the guy got famous!”
“What?!”
I was glad that she couldn’t hear my joshy, Damon Runyon way of expressing a thought so trivial and insincere, and I leaned forward as the music switched to a syrupy, more hushed ballad. “I’m getting worried. Sitting here, I feel sort of ashamed of us …”
“I know,” she said, blinking rapidly, “but first I want to show you Ocean Grove.”
“Would you like anything,” she said when we got to the house, “w-w-water, whiskey?”
“I wouldn’t,” I lied. “I need to get back this afternoon, to teach an evening class.”
“Creative writing,” she said drily, keeping a steady gaze on me, “on Hallowe’en?”
“Haw. Not even ghosts and goblins have a holiday on Hallowe’en. And you’d be surprised at how many of those want a master’s degree and end up taking my workshop.”
“Hang on, I think I’ll go up and get more comfortable, slip into my pajama jeans.”
After tarry double espressos, she had walked me through a covered passage that cut through the abandoned casino and led to the adjoining community of Ocean Grove where the Methodists still had their summer camps. Along the boardwalk there, hideous condos littered the waterfront in a solid tawdry vinyl-sided wall, yet just in back of them rose the colorful turrets and cyclopean gables of the original Victorian mansions, all kept spit-spot and averting their dignified, make that mortified, stares away from crass modernity.
We half-circled the block then had come upon the modest and charming dollhouse rows where the town’s mere middle-class mortals got a slice of the pie. Narrow and all of wood, they were twee; simple keyhole-saw gingerbread latticed the shallow porches. We halted to take it all in. The block was shady, with sun peeking through the elms, and even considering the chill of the advancing day a sense of tranquility hung in the air.
“There’s just enough room for two to live civilly and harmoniously together,” said Dita, “depending on which two. That one, with the vulgar, superfluous fairy lights strung up, and those dumb crystals getting ready to blind whoever passes by, is where she lives.”
“She.”
“The girl Scott met,” she said, and when I shrugged, then for added effect dropped my jaw, we eased back into a stroll. “In truth, I wasn’t angry. He met her one summer or the spring before when I was on sabbatical. Anyway, I was in Europe the whole time.”
“In Poland, with your mother and family.”
“But all over Europe. Not the point. I wasn’t angry, not even the least bit. Not even jealous. He thought I was both. I figured he might have called and told you.”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “And was it a tortured, passionate, doomed affair?”
“Not at all, Scott was happy. Very happy. And I was happy for him. I thought he might have called you to work it up into some big melodrama in his mind between us, but in fact I was supportive. He wanted me to be jealous, but I was thrilled. He only became angry when I suggested he try living with her. It wasn’t necessary—but he could, I said.”
“I think I follow you,” I responded, lightly chucklin
“It was the same summer he and his buddy from old times, Kenny, were going to get their duo going. They played on the boardwalk and Kenny, according to Scott, said Scott’s songs were the real thing. They hoped to play clubs next. And so on. I met her. Scott was too proud not to introduce us. I really didn’t like the idea, I thought it was unnecessary, no good for anybody, but he insisted, and when Scott insists—yes, you get it, no? Should we go up to the house and knock and ask her?”
“You mean if she’s seen Scott?”
“No, I suppose not. You’re right. If she was hiding him, I would already know. I gave the address to the police and the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Department and put it all in their hands. If they can’t find it in one of these crackerboxes it’s probably not there. Where would she put him, under the floor? He’s claustrophobic. And hates the mother.”
“She lives with her mother?”
As though she’d been rehearsing for days, yet without much talent for this kind of thing—the contemptuous, continental “nonjealous” bit—Dita droned on at quite a clip.
“How else would she survive? She’s too stupid to work, I think in fact retarded.”
It came to me: Asperger Girl. I’d come in at the end, having been away in France for the summer. But of course there were other reasons to tuck it out of my memory too.
At the corner of the next block I saw the skeletons of the camp meeting’s tent city. As I understood it—Dita was too busy cycling through her own spiritual cleansing to stop and enlighten me otherwise—the Methodists used these frames and foundations to throw their canvas tarps over to serve as roof and walls. At the backs, fully enclosed structures housed kitchen and bathroom. They slept with only a layer of cloth between themselves and the stars, and it was such a model of goodness and decency, fresh air, cold plunges in the Atlantic followed by a round of singing and revival, that I was saddened. I knew that Stephen Crane, the sickly and slight son of stalwart Methodists, had been trundled about New Jersey among relatives as a small boy after his father’s death, and that he’d fetched up in Asbury Park and as a young reporter had walked these streets. At least as much as a writer is made, or has been given in life, he also grabs and molds his material. Crane had been handed an early death sentence with his chronic lung ailments and he was dead from tuberculosis before turning thirty. But before that he’d traveled on freighters and covered revolutions, and he wrote one certifiable masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, about a war that ended six years before he was born, convincing everyone including his betters in England, from James and Wells to Conrad and Ford, that since “Stevie” couldn’t possibly be a veteran of the bloodiest conflict in American history, the only reasonable conclusion to draw was that he must be a genius. In Sussex, where Crane was dying and in hock to creditors back home, the greatest English writers of the previous generation had doted on an undersized giant. But no one was going to dote on Scott. I’d once sinned against him, it was true. I’d touched him the wrong way in private, caressing his neck and monitoring his confusion with my dumb puppy eyes, insulting not so much his manhood as his talent and intelligence. I regretted it immediately, and wondered if he’d ever told Dita about it.