Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He’d stripped to his undershorts, sweating and panting. The whistling was fading out the way a radio station fades, then suddenly it’s gone. In the doorway of her cheap glitzy bathroom he switched on the fluorescent tubing and said, “What are you doing in there, sweetheart? What’re you doing in the tub like that?”

  He came closer, peering. His nostrils were widened with the smell of it.

  Behind him she was saying, “Colin? What? What are you—?”

  He played at the half horror he actually did feel. Peering at the spectacle through his fingers.

  “Sweetheart? Hartley? What did you do to yourself?”

  She came up behind him, scared, padding barefoot, heavy on her heels but not daring to touch him. Saying, “Colin? What’s wrong?”—trying to look over his shoulder at what was in there, in the tub. Sometimes there’s a part missing in you Colin you’re so—. Then she did touch him, her fingers brushing his wrist, but he didn’t feel it.

  “One side of your head is broken,” he said. “There’s blood in the water. Hartley? Sweetheart? What happened? What did you do to yourself?”

  High and wobbly on stilts he freaked her out, seeing it there in the tub, seeing her, the vision so powerful she saw it herself, or almost. Begging him to stop. Begging him for Christ’s sake please stop. He advanced to the bathtub talking to what was almost there, the dead female lying naked in the scummy water, big breasts floating, nipples like bruised eyes. There was coagulated blood from the gash from the rim where the skull had cracked; the fingernails and toenails had turned blue. In amazement and pity Colin Asch crouched over the corpse, speaking to it while Hartley Evans tugged at his arm, laughing shrilly, begging him please for Christ’s sake to stop—“You’re driving me crazy. You’re crazy.”

  They were in an elevator together and the cable’d snapped. Was that it? Next time she spoke of D.D. he would kill her—it was that simple. He guessed she knew. Or maybe, cow cunt, she didn’t know. In bed afterward burying his face in her neck saying Love, love, love, having trouble staying hard enough to enter her then when he did she winced as if in pain and he lost it, started to slip out, he thought of hurting her finally and unmistakably so she’d let him go but then he thought of D.D. and of how she would be saddened by this, if she knew … shocked, saddened, disgusted. After all she expected so much more of Colin Asch. Please Dorothea I want to be good. I am trying to be good. Deciding then not to fuck H. or to frighten her but begging her instead for forgiveness, like a child sobbing; she knew he was an orphan didn’t she, she’d wrap him in her arms in forgiveness wouldn’t she, of course she would. Please help me Dorothea to be good. And as if by a miracle the meanness drained from him.

  And in the morning neither C. nor H. would remember a thing. Or almost.

  K.R.8821Am was the notation. So terse, elliptical. A code not even the FBI could crack.

  But inadequate to convey all he’d felt. After so many hours, days, of stalking. And then the world became so suddenly perfect. PERFECT.

  Someday he would share his secrets with her; he would lay the Blue Ledger itself in her lap and invite her to read. In a calm lucid voice like a broadcaster’s skilled voice he would say, “You see, it’s like Euclid discovering the truths of geometry. The pure inviolate absolute truths of geometry. Not inventing—discovering.”

  And the euphoria that followed, though it was finite, was so very real. The blueness of the Blue Room: he’d take her there too. Someday.

  She looks old enough almost to be your mother: the words flung out haphazardly, cruelly—inaccurately. For D.D. hardly looked old enough to be Colin Asch’s mother, nor did she in the slightest resemble Colin Asch’s mother so far as he could recall her. Mrs. Asch, dead, drowned, so many years ago. A soft-bodied vague woman with artistic pretensions, a coarse braided rope of blond hair like a peasant girl’s, nervous squinty eyes and nothing of Colin Asch’s fine-boned features in her face: nothing. He had the snapshots to prove it! She’d smoked cigarettes compulsively; she stank of cigarette smoke. She’d smoked cigarettes while bearing Colin Asch in her womb. If she loved him he did not remember. If she loved him, “it wasn’t anything personal; she’d have loved anyone in the same circumstances.” Mr. Kreuzer had made the boys snigger, shocked, quoting them some ancient king or soldier who’d disparaged his brother—Why should I honor him just because the two of us came out of the same hole?

  And then there was Mr. Asch, whom Colin Asch remembered even less clearly. Dead, drowned. A Manhattan textbook publisher of whom no one had ever heard until the news went out over the syndicate wires about the submerged car, the twelve-year-old boy who’d dived and dived and dived from the riverbank to save his doomed parents.… Colin Asch remembered none of it afterward, or very little, knowing mainly what police and others chose to tell him, and he hadn’t asked questions because he’d never been that kind of child. Think of your mother and father in a better, finer world, with God, Mrs. Kendrich said, touching his cheek. Drive your cart over the bones of the dead, Mr. Kreuzer said, touching his cheek. There was a burial site, a joint grave marker, in Katonah, New York, but it wasn’t Colin Asch’s responsibility and he had neither seen it nor thought of it in years.

  “And the body’s cells change completely every seven years.”

  The $638 cash out of K.R.’s wallet was his reward, also the platinum wristwatch fancy tie clip crocodile belt cuff links silk rep tie shoes fancy fur astrakhan hat the fucker’d been wearing—to the victor go the spoils. The hat especially: you couldn’t say that Colin Asch was timid, wearing the hat for all to see should they see. But no one save D.D.—of course—had the power to see Colin Asch in his truest self.

  He’d stood close behind her easing the fur coat onto her, helping her with the sleeves. Lovely silky blackly iridescent fur—was it maybe mink? Nearly a head taller than the woman, he’d observed her greedily in the mirror, her dark beautiful worried eyes, the faintest of white lines bracketing her mouth, gaze veiled by thought; he was saying how thoughtful of her it had been, sending him a birthday card—“I’ve kept it, I’m treasuring it. I won’t forget it.” His voice close to quavering.

  For of all the world, who had treated him decently, like a human being—like a human soul—and not some piece of mere shit you could slight, and insult, and forget, and cast disapproving looks at (like his asshole “Uncle” Martin’d begun to do), or tell to get out, go away and crawl into a hole maybe and die? Of all the world no one save D.D. cared for him, or knew him.

  She knew of course that Colin Asch was the person who’d sent her the Christmas gift: the lace jacket, the floor-length skirt. The instant their eyes had met despite the presence of the jabbering others that fact was established. Thus there was no need for the woman to press Colin Asch’s hand and whisper “Thank you” to him, though when they did shake hands—this being the style of affluent America, vigorous sincere-seeming handshakes all around, men and women both—the communication came to him by way of the warmth and surprising strength of her hand. Our secret remains our secret—ours alone.

  And when he’d popped the hat on his head, feeling buoyant, nerved up, just the slightest bit crazy with the risk of it, and the joke of it too, D.D. had taken it in knowingly, those dark worried eyes lifting to his (for of course she would fear for his safety, having no knowledge of his past accomplishments or of the ingeniousness of the Baffle, no practical knowledge of the stupidity of the police) and had said she’d liked it: “It’s very handsome!”

  At her car they’d spoken quite directly. Now she knew, if she had not previously known; now he knew that she knew—there was forever that bond between them as if when he’d lowered the wire noose so swiftly and cleanly over the fucker’s head, when instantaneously he’d jerked it tight, tight, tight, her fingers had guided his own, had fitted themselves to his, warm, soft, surprisingly strong. Thus with Colin Asch’s sworn enemies: he’d known what he wanted to do and he had done it! and it was done! She would not have wished to witness the actual eve
nt, for pity was a fault in her perhaps, as in Colin Asch, or was it rather a magnanimity of spirit—like the great poets and visionaries who seek to embrace the All—so the actuality, the fact of it, would have frightened her, dismayed her, that Death after all is but a feeble word, a mere syllable, to set beside Dying—its physicality, its awful ignoble convulsive struggle—and the sudden stench of shit in the fucker’s pants, the transformation of R.K. into K.R., into mere meat. The man had been strong, but Colin Asch with his rock-hard shoulder and arm muscles, the powerful tight muscles of his thighs too which, by way of leverage, he brought to bear upon the victim; ah, Colin Asch that radiant angel boy was stronger!—always stronger! “Did you doubt me, Dorothea? Because I seemed to be taking so long? You should never doubt me, Dorothea.”

  She had allowed him to know, in parting, that she would never divulge his secret—of course. For it was her own secret as well. And that, yes, he’d made her happy—“very.”

  Which, after all, had been the point of it.

  ANYTHING DONE HENCEFORTH IS BLESSED

  BECAUSE IT EMANATES FROM THE SOUL

  Thus Colin Asch wrote in the Blue Ledger that night.

  The Blue Ledger, precious as Colin Asch’s very life, for in a sense it was his life, was sometimes carried in his duffel bag, sometimes locked in the trunk of the Olds, less frequently hidden between the bedsprings and the mattress of his bed in the spacious silken-wallpapered guest room the Weidmanns had given him, rent-free, since his arrival in November. But it was there, in that room, that the Blue Ledger showed signs of having been disturbed—taken from its secret place, probably looked into, if not minutely scrutinized, then replaced, but clumsily replaced! so that Colin Asch with his sharp eye and instinct for danger knew what had happened at once. His nostrils contracted as with a sudden virulent odor.

  “I will have to kill her after all—if she was the one.”

  The thought upset him, and saddened him—his aunt was one of the few human beings on the planet he’d thought he could trust.

  But when he went to her, speaking quietly, smiling, his shut fists hidden behind his thighs, the woman professed such innocence, and ignorance, Colin understood she hadn’t seen the Ledger after all; she knew nothing about it. Shrewdly Colin had not mentioned the notebook, only the fact that someone had been in his room going through his things rearranging his things without his knowledge or permission and he didn’t like it. “I thought, you know, Aunt Ginny,” he said, beginning to get a little breathless, “that no one would dare violate my privacy in this house. That I could trust people in this house of all the fucking places in the world.” Ginny Weidmann’s eyes widened and grew moist. She said, “I suppose—it might have been Tula.”

  Colin said, still quietly, “I asked you not to let her in my room didn’t I.”

  “Yes, dear, and I explained to her, but—”

  “I said I’d do my own fucking cleaning, didn’t I.”

  “Colin, dear, please—please don’t be angry,” Ginny Weidmann said. “I’m sure it was an innocent mistake. I’m sure that Tula just forgot. Or she may have misunderstood my—”

  “You told her to clean in there, didn’t you? ’Cause you were worried I wasn’t cleaning up my own crap, weren’t you?”

  “No, dear, I’m sure that I—I don’t remember precisely—”

  “’Cause you didn’t trust me. To keep things clean. And I told you the first day, I told you, I can’t bear it that a black woman has to clean up after me, I can’t bear it; I told you, I explained, and you said you understood.” The injustice of it ran like a flame over his brain, his soul. Still, he managed to control his voice. “Just because we have white skins and they have black skins, and we’ve exploited them through the centuries, and the conditions are still slave conditions, only the proportions have been altered.”

  “But Colin,” Ginny Weidmann said, removing her half-moon reading glasses and setting them nervously aside, “Tula has worked for us for years! I’m sure she is very fond of us!”

  “‘Tula,’ as you call her—though she doesn’t call you ‘Ginny,’ does she—hasn’t worked for me for years.”

  “But she—”

  “She hasn’t worked for me for years!”

  He backed out of the room and she followed him, apologizing, weakly protesting, her nephew who was rapidly losing control of himself for as sudden sometimes as sexual desire it sprang up in him: the need to do hurt! to restore balance! justice! Literally wringing her hands, and her pop eyes swimming with tears. “Colin? Do you really think it’s—wrong?”

  In another part of the house the black maid was vacuuming. The sound ran through Colin Asch, pulsing with the rage of his own blood.

  “For us to hire them? Whites? Blacks?”

  Colin Asch backed away from the woman, his hands in front of him now in a gesture of angry submission. He wasn’t going to hurt her; she was one of those he wasn’t going to hurt no matter how she tempted him. Blowsy cow with her face all gummed up, fifty-five years old and the “red rinse” glimmering in her hair, not to mention the diamonds—ah yes the diamonds—on her left hand winking and jeering at him. He’d helped himself to small change out of her purse now and then, and he’d walked off with tiny crap items no one’d ever miss around the house, a three-inch carved jade elephant on the mantel, a little silver bowl or cup some businessman had given Martin Weidmann in 1977, plus some tacky gold cuff links in the bottom of Martin’s jewelry drawer in the bedroom with a look of never being used, but the big things he’d drawn magic circles around not to cross into and violate since Colin Asch knew from past experience that once he got started it was very difficult to stop. “The final thing is, you’ve got to mash in their brains.” But the bitch had a nerve—you had to hand it to her—waving her jewels in his face when she knew Colin Asch had nothing, and no prospects: hadn’t been able to enroll in a fancy Ivy League college like her shithead children; thus he was fated to occupy an inferior position for life—or was he?

  He’d run upstairs to the room to get his duffel bag (in which the Blue Ledger was carefully secreted; hand over hand he tossed things in, panting, as Ginny Weidmann, frightened, tried to placate him. But Colin Asch was not a man to be placated. His integrity would not allow it. His very soul was sickened. So upset he’d begun to stammer, telling the ignorant white woman who was his aunt that she and her kind should be ashamed of their exploitation of the black underclass—“Paying an entire class of human beings to shovel up your shit for you. And boasting it’s ‘employment’! And boasting it’s ‘wages’!”

  Here was Ginny Weidmann crying at last, Ginny Weidmann who’d never in her blind complacent life been so attacked, so exposed, it was like he’d slapped the bitch in the face the way she cringed, staring at him, like Moses and the burning bush you’d think, like Jacob and the angel, so Colin Asch felt sorry for her—almost—as she pleaded, “Colin? Colin? I’m sure that Tula likes us, forgives us. And she needs the money I pay her, and I tip her too, Colin, I try to be generous.”

  Colin felt a stab of pity for his aunt, sympathy almost; he was yanking the new merino sweater down over his head, heather-colored it was, beautiful hand-knit wool, $198 marked down to a bargain $125 for the post-Christmas sale in the Village Haberdashery where he’d bought it; he was brushing his hair irritably out of his eyes, trying to explain to his aunt patiently as you’d explain to a child or a retarded adult that it was the capitalist class structure that was the tragedy, that she and Martin were as much victims of it as Tula—“If her people were trained for decent-paying jobs, if they were college-educated like most middle-class whites, they wouldn’t have to work as slaves for you, or starve.”

  Ginny Weidmann stood watching Colin Asch, a crumpled tissue pressed against her mouth. Her eyes, swimming in hurt, followed him as if without comprehension. She cried, “Colin, dear—what are you doing? Are you packing your things? Are you leaving?”

  Politely but emphatically he shifted her out of his path and went t
o the closet. Fuck it: he’d have to make several trips, what with the new clothes and the books, and that pissed him, definitely—it’d have been the shrewdest maneuver to pack up the car on the sly, then simply walk out, shutting the door behind him. Or could he talk Aunt Ginny into giving him a hand?

  “You’re—leaving? Like this? Just walking out? Like this? Without even saying goodbye to Martin?”

  Colin Asch cast the woman a look meaning yes. Meaning how can you ask? Meaning you are the one who has forced this, not I.

  Of course he had a place to go, he had places—Christ! more than he could count!—but he hadn’t yet signed the lease for the apartment, he’d been about to sign then got worried then made an appointment to see the other apartment, Sylvan Towers was one, Fairleigh Place the other, couldn’t decide between the two since the rent was about the same and both buildings advertised “no fee”; then Susannah—Mrs. Hunt; he’d met her in the Bookworm—the sable coat attracted him first then the strong snubbed profile then the quick-darting eyes with a look of something knowing, ribald, in them—and she’d been attracted (that was obvious) to him: mop-headed and a bit sullen like a college kid home on vacation and had been quarreling with his parents wandering now in the only bookstore in town with an expression of faint incredulity You call this a bookstore!—this?—and he’d been on one crutch, his right foot bandaged, a skiing accident at Vail, or was it Switzerland—“People like you better if you’re crippled or maimed somehow”—then Susannah Hunt insisted he look at an apartment in her building, Normandy Court, which he liked a lot; it sort of bowled him over with the view of the edge of a park and a balcony where, mornings, he could have breakfast, and the walls were such a pure spotless white and the hardwood floors so gleaming—two bedrooms, two baths, unfurnished—a long living room with glass along one wall where he’d have the celebration party for Dorothea Deverell when she got her promotion—you could fit fifty people in there without much trouble—and the kitchen, though small, was all modern fixtures and really cool: “This place could turn me domestic,” he’d said, rocking back on his heels, and Mrs. Hunt, laughing through her cigarette smoke, squeezed his wrist and said, “I have the identical kitchen, Colin, and it hasn’t done a thing for me.”