Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates
Yet in the past he has behaved unpredictably. She’d thought that he was through with her, she’d seen disgust in his face, nothing so sincere as disgust in a man’s face; and yet—he’d called her, after a week, ten days.
Or, he’d showed up at the apartment. Knocking on the door before inserting the key.
And almost, in his face a look of anger, resentment.
Couldn’t keep away.
God, I’m crazy for you.
In the mirror she likes to examine herself if the light isn’t too bright. Mirror to avoid is the bathroom mirror unprotected and raw-lit by daylight but the bureau mirror is softer, more forgiving. Bureau mirror is the woman she is.
Actually she looks (she thinks) younger than thirty-two.
Much younger than thirty-nine!
A girl’s pouty face, full lips, red-lipstick lips. Sulky-brunette still damned good-looking and he knows it, he has seen men on the street and in restaurants following her with their eyes, undressing her with their eyes, this is exciting to him (she knows) though if she seems to react, if she glances around, he will become angry—at her.
What a man wants, she thinks, is a woman whom other men want but the woman must not seem to seek out this attention or even be aware of it.
She would never bleach her hair blond, she exults in her brunette beauty knowing it is more real, earthier. Nothing phony, synthetic, showy about her.
Next birthday, forty. Maybe she will kill herself.
Though it’s eleven A.M. he has stopped for a drink at the Shamrock. Vodka on the rocks. Just one.
Excited thinking about the sulky-faced woman waiting for him: in the plush blue chair, at the window, nude except for high-heeled shoes.
Full lips, lipstick-red. Heavy-lidded eyes. A head of thick hair, just slightly coarse. And hairs elsewhere on her body, that arouse him.
Slight disgust, yet arousal.
Yet he’s late, why is that? Something seems to be pulling at him, holding him back. Another vodka?
Staring at his watch thinking—If I am not with her by eleven-fifteen it will mean it’s over.
A flood of relief, never having to see her again!
Never the risk of losing his control with her, hurting her.
Never the risk she will provoke him into a tussle.
She’s thinking she will give the bastard ten more minutes.
If he arrives after eleven-fifteen it is over between them.
Her fingers grope for the shears beneath the cushion. There!
She has no intention of stabbing him—of course. Not here in her room, not where he’d bleed onto the plush blue chair and the green carpet and she would never be able to remove the stains even if she could argue (she could argue) that he’d tried to kill her, more than once in his strenuous lovemaking he’d closed his fingers around her throat, she’d begun to protest Please don’t, hey you are hurting me but he’d seemed scarcely to hear, in a delirium of sexual rapacity, pounding his heavy body into her like a jackhammer.
You have no right to treat me like that. I am not a whore, I am not your pathetic wife. If you insult me I will kill you—I will kill you to save my own life.
Last spring for instance when he’d come to take her out to Delmonico’s but seeing her he’d gotten excited, clumsy bastard knocking over the bedside lamp and in the dimlit room they’d made love in her bed and never got out until too late for supper and she’d overheard him afterward on the phone explaining—in the bathroom stepping out of the shower she’d listened at the door fascinated, furious—the sound of a man’s voice when he is explaining to a wife is so callow, so craven, she’s sick with contempt recalling. Yet he says he has left his family, he loves her.
Runs his hands over her body like a blind man trying to see. And the radiance in his face that’s pitted and scarred, he needs her in the way a starving man needs food. Die without you. Don’t leave me.
Well, she loves him! She guesses.
Eleven A.M. He is crossing the street at Ninth and Twenty-fourth. Gusts of wind blow grit into his eyes. The vodka is coursing along his veins.
Feels determined: if she stares at him with that reproachful pouty expression he will slap her face and if she begins to cry he will close his fingers around her throat and squeeze, squeeze.
She has not threatened to speak to his wife. As her predecessor had done, to her regret. Yet, he imagines that she is rehearsing such a confrontation.
Mrs. ____? You don’t know me but I know you. I am the woman your husband loves.
He has told her it isn’t what she thinks. Isn’t his family that keeps him from loving her all he could love her but his life he’d never told anyone about in the war, in the infantry, in France. What crept like paralysis through him.
Things that had happened to him, and things that he’d witnessed, and (a few) things that he’d perpetrated himself with his own hands. And if they’d been drinking this look would come into his face of sorrow, horror. A sickness of regret she did not want to understand. And she’d taken his hands that had killed (she supposed) (but only in wartime) and kissed them, and brought them against her breasts that were aching like the breasts of a young mother ravenous to give suck, and sustenance.
And she said No. That is your old life.
I am your new life.
He has entered the foyer. At last!
It is eleven A.M.—he is not late after all. His heart is pounding in his chest.
Waves of adrenaline as he has not felt since the war.
On Ninth Avenue he purchased a bottle of whiskey, and from a street vendor he purchased a bouquet of one dozen blood-red roses.
For the woman in the window. Kill or be killed.
Soon as he unlocks the door, soon as he sees her, he will know what it is he will do to her.
Eleven A.M. In the plush blue chair in the window the woman is waiting nude, except for her high-heeled shoes. Another time she checks the shears hidden beneath the cushion, that feel strangely warm to her touch, even damp.
Stares out the window at a narrow patch of sky. Almost, she is at peace. She is prepared. She waits.
EDWARD HOPPER, Eleven A.M., 1926
The Long-Legged Girl
On the bathroom counter she’d come to hate (it was old, beige-flesh-toned Formica, with faint cracks you could not help mistake with a shudder of repugnance for loose hairs) the wife set out the husband’s prescription pills both current and years-old.
So many! The wife had foraged in the medicine cabinet and in cupboards beneath the sink. The husband’s medical history in miniature: digoxin (heart), blood thinner (high blood pressure), painkiller (root canal work), Lipitor (cholesterol), barbiturates (insomnia). Plus capsules for kidney dysfunction, so old they’d begun to crack and leak their white gritty powder.
Also on a shelf beneath the sink her groping fingers found an old sticky four-ounce container of Deet.
Her plan was to grind a selection of the medications into a fine powder and this powder she would dissolve in tea. Very hot exotic tea, to disguise the taste. She’d become a connoisseur of herbal infusions and had an impressive array on a kitchen shelf: passion fruit, cinnamon apple spice, citrus zinger, pomegranate zinger, peppermint, Bengal. Even the Deet would be undetectable if she didn’t include more than a drop from an eyedropper.
In this way, she would regain control of her life. Of what remained of her life.
Yes, it was deliberate: she was using the husband’s medications exclusively, and none of her own.
Beautiful Wedgwood teacups she would place side by side on saucers, on a tray. One of these would contain the lethal concoction, the other just herbal tea. She had yet to work out how precisely she would do this, for she had to be very clever; she must not arouse suspicion in her visitor, for that would be catastrophic. Even if others forgave her, never would she forgive herself.
To the casual eye—to the visitor’s eye—there would appear to be no difference between the teacups and their contents: steaming-hot
For this solemn transaction, as she thought it, the wife would use two of her most exquisite teacups, inherited from a long-ghosted great-grandmother: pearl-white Wedgewood with tiny pink roses. She would have to wash the cups beforehand, fastidiously—the cups had not been used in years. No one gave a damn about teacups any longer: in the wife’s lifetime the world had coarsened to stout, sturdy-proletarian mugs for all hot drinks. Certainly the husband’s thick fingers could not have handled such delicate teacups, he’d probably broken china from the Wedgwood set years ago which was why so few pieces remained. But the visitor would notice, probably: the classy visitor would exclaim Oh! How beautiful!
Or possibly: Oh, Mrs. Stockman! How beautiful!
Like the gracious hostess the wife knew herself to be, or would have been if her life had not rattled along a terribly wrong, mistaken trolley track, she would allow her visitor to choose between the cups. She would drink from the cup that remained.
Like Russian roulette, it was. Though radically abbreviated, and played without the opponent’s knowledge. You don’t owe your adversary the first shot—this was a principle of gun ownership, one of myriad fatuous catchphrases you often heard in rural New Hampshire.
What mattered was, the wife’s fate would lie outside her. She would be blameless.
The music of chance. Whatever is, is.
By the time the medications are ground into fine white odorless powder and a single droplet of Deet mixed into the powder the bright May afternoon has waned. A roller-coaster day, a rare day when the wife can breathe. (For the wife is asthmatic, at times. More recently, more frequently.) Now trembling with excitement, or with dread so thrilling it is indistinguishable from excitement. At the stove staring at the teakettle heating on blue flames with a vibratory hum.
She hears the doorbell. Is it five-thirty P.M.—so soon?
Hears the oldest daughter’s just-slightly-mocking voice: “Hey, Mom? One of Dad’s students is here.”
“God damn. No.”
But yes. For everywhere in the village the wife’s eyes locked onto her: the long-legged girl.
Even before the wife knew the girl’s name. Even before the wife knew, could guess, could not not-know, how (intimately, outrageously) she and the long-legged girl were connected.
Along the periphery of the sprawling college campus on its several wooded hills. On leafy walkways in the village, and on pedestrian crossings on Main Street. In the college bookstore, in the frozen yogurt store, in the CVS and in Geno’s Pizzeria. In the post office facing the village green, and on the graveled paths of the village green. Suddenly it began to happen that the hapless wife’s eyes swerved in their sockets like magnets drawn to the irresistible figure of the long-legged girl.
An elegantly poised girl. A girl with long straight silver-blond hair that fell past her shoulders, a perfect patrician profile, gray-green eyes gliding like liquid over prim adult faces. A girl who wore black leotards, or very short black spandex shorts, or skintight jeans that curved down at her impossibly narrow hips to expose not only her dimple of a belly button but the soft pale down surrounding it like a halo.
A girl of (perhaps) twenty-one. A girl with a face so young, so unlined, she might’ve been a fetus. (The wife thought, meanly.) Lithe, sly, graceful as a dancer even when straddling a bicycle crossing College Avenue in front of the wife’s compact Nissan.
In fact, was the long-legged girl a dancer? One of the husband’s young protégées?
Strange and unnerving, that the wife (who had a reputation for not seeming to recognize anyone in public places) should so frequently see the long-legged girl, and be stopped in her tracks by the sight of the girl.
Especially, driving had become hazardous for the wife. At such times she was particularly prone to seeing the girl and so she’d become apprehensive, distracted whenever she left the house. Lately insomniac, sleep like a tattered quilt that didn’t quite cover her stubby feet, she had to make an effort to stay awake behind the wheel of her car, to brake at traffic lights and stop signs, crosswalks. Once, she’d been a quite good driver. The children would never believe it.
Mom, wake up!
But she was awake. That was the problem.
Spring was dazzling-bright and all too soon, too much after a bitter-cold New England winter of terrifying ennui. The wife was a food writer, of some small, quality renown. But food had begun to fail, as inspiration, even as she overate compulsively. (Or is all overeating compulsive?) Writing had become too much effort, like trying to push a coarse thread through the eye of a small needle: nerves of steel were required, and for so paltry a reward. She’d even begun to dread leaving the house where once any excuse had been enough to propel her out the door—like checking out a new organic tofu restaurant. Reckless courage had to be summoned to press the switch in the garage, to send the door upward in a roll of thunder, to climb into the car that smelled as if something small had died in it, to back out of the garage with shut eyes. An accident waiting to happen but if it was truly an accident that awaited, somewhere beyond the end of the badly cracked asphalt driveway of the Stockman residence on cryptically named Hope Street, how could the fault be hers?
Nothing so demoralized the wife as household errands involving groceries, dry cleaners, hardware stores. The sand fleas of quotidian life crawling up your legs, invisible and awful. And bloodsucking, in the tiniest increments.
Dreading the short drive into town. Scarcely a mile. She’d put on weight, no longer walked where once, not so very long ago, she’d not only walked but ran—or almost. Fast-walked, it used to be called.
So, had to drive. Had to hoist herself into the car. Damned Nissan so compact, so cheap-built, she could feel it (she’d swear) sag beneath her weight with a faint jeering protest. And as she drove toward Main Street where during the school year the procession of undergraduates never ceased, like marionettes that have broken their strings, she would begin to feel a deeper dread, as of something in the marrow of her bones begging, pleading with her—No. Turn back. It isn’t too late—even as another time she felt the rapid-eye excitation of REM sleep, an involuntary tug of her eyeballs so that she was seeing, to her dismay, the long-legged blond girl on a sidewalk, or in the street, or on her bicycle hurtling past like the Greek goddess of the hunt Artemis …
Unmistakably, it was that girl. Though two-thirds of the undergraduates at the college seemed to be blond, and most of these were tall and long-legged, and attractive, and wore interchangeable clothes, yet the girl the wife chanced to see was invariably that girl.
“But I don’t know who she is. I have never seen her before.”
The wife spoke to herself in vexed terms, usually. Dismay with herself, mounting frustration.
At the spring dance recital at the music school? Had it been there the wife had first seen the long-legged girl who was one of Victor Stockman’s senior thesis students?
With an effort the wife could remember. But perhaps she did not wish to remember.
So many dance recitals. So many senior advisees. Decades of girl-undergraduates at the liberal arts college in the Hampshire hills. And dance was a popular major of course since for virtually all majors it was a useless art, a perishable craft, an expensive vanity, a folly to be performed for visiting families, to stir pride in the foolish, and to assuage the unease over the preposterously high tuition and fees at the college.
Founded in 1879, the college could claim its history as one of the first women’s colleges in the United States. On its fabled wooded hills it had been kept small and select, a handpicked fifteen hundred students, unlike the slovenly-large state university a few miles away with its democratic masses; now coed, but with far fewer young men than women and these young men, on the whole, less academically impressive than the women.
It had been purely chance. On
She’d been blond once herself. When she’d been a single-digit age.
Now, what you’d call dirty-blond. Split ends, crackling-dry and casually combed. It was enough to see to the children’s hair and general grooming, she hadn’t time to squander on her own or on anything of hers that was merely hers.
Seeing the flush rising from the husband’s wattled neck into his face, hearing that startled intake of breath, the wife asked coolly, “Is that the one? The long-legged one? And is she one of a series, or is she the last of a series?” It was a wild stab, and a mistake.
For the husband did not laugh. The husband did not laugh at the wife for uttering so bizarre a remark, as ordinarily he’d have done with a dismissive wave of his hand, but instead the husband flushed more deeply and stammered: “Eli, I am sorry. Oh, God! Can you forgive me …”
Very still the wife sat. This was not what she’d anticipated. Caught in the God damned seat belt like an overgrown baby in a high chair. Oh, the wife could not breathe.
Yet she managed, in her most caustic voice, like Eve Arden of the nineteen forties: “Don’t be silly, Victor. Take your foot off the brake. Look where you’re going. Drive.”