Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Dorothea was clutching at Charles Carpenter’s hand with both her hands. “Did she—did she really say that? ‘Is it Dorothea Deverell?’”

  “Yes. She did. She isn’t an unobservant woman, after all.”

  “But you told her ‘No.’”

  “I told her ‘No’ as a means of telling her something else—eliding speech, in a sense—not very courageously, I’m ashamed to say, but in the desperation of the moment expediently; I didn’t want Agnes, in her rage, to involve you. To pick up the telephone and call you. That would have been unthinkable, dear.”

  Dorothea was still clutching Charles’s hand in her hands, and now she leaned forward suddenly, as if faint, and pressed her forehead against it. She was thinking, What will happen now? What will happen—now? She murmured, “So you’ve told her, Charles, at last!” Dazedly she kissed his hand, her face damp with tears—she had not known she was crying. She whispered, “I love you,” and Charles Carpenter kissed her warm forehead, whispering, “I love you,” passionately, repeatedly, as if he were making a formal vow.

  “Now maybe we can give up all this—subterfuge. This damned demeaning subterfuge. I am at fault, for postponing a break with my wife for so long; in retrospect I’m appalled at my cowardice. My ‘goodness.’ My very sense of myself as citizen of a community! You’ve been so patient, Dorothea, a saint, really—having such faith in me. But now, soon, we can live together, openly—we can be married, and live together, in a house of our own—like normal people.” He laughed excitedly, as if the single glass of whiskey had gone to his head; he slung an arm around Dorothea almost roughly, hugging her close. “Imagine, Dorothea darling: married. Like normal people.”

  “Yes,” Dorothea Deverell said. “Yes,” she wept, though in truth she could not imagine it. Not after so many years of hope.

  So, that night, after Charles Carpenter left her—they had gone at last up to Dorothea’s bedroom to make love, as ardently as if for the first time—Dorothea Deverell lay wakeful, rigid, her eyes starkly open and her brain a storm of thoughts. Like maddened wasps the question assailed her: What will happen now? What will happen—now? Though she tried to think of Charles Carpenter, and her love for him, and the possibility—or was it, now, a probability?—of their being married someday soon and living in a house of their own—indeed, Dorothea had just the house in mind, or its type: Georgian revival, elegant, stately, though not large, in the older “good” section of Lathrup Farms—she nonetheless kept envisioning Agnes Carpenter, her rival, her sister rival, lying at the very same moment sleepless in her bed, in her bedroom, on the other side of town; she envisioned the woman’s stunned, creased, aging face and those terrified glaring eyes—Is it another woman? Is it Dorothea Deverell?

  I had so much rather be an object of her selfishness, Dorothea thought miserably, than have her be the object of mine.

  So Dorothea passed a hellish night, the first, she presumed, of many to come; and this the consequence of her happiness—hers and Charles Carpenter’s! By morning she had made up her mind, and telephoned Charles at his office, and told the astonished man in a rush of words that he should wait—they should wait, must wait—and not do anything further to upset Agnes.

  “To upset Agnes?” Charles Carpenter asked, as if he had not heard correctly.

  Dorothea said, “Please don’t be angry, dear, but I—I can’t bear to hurt her. I can’t bear it that you and I, in our selfishness, should hurt her. In time, perhaps—in a few months, gradually—it could all be explained to her, but not so suddenly—so cruelly. It’s like murder! such an assault! And there are two of us, Charles, and only one of her: think of how she must feel!”

  Charles protested, “I don’t want to hurt Agnes either, but it has to be done. In fact it has been postponed far too long, as I thought you’d agreed. If you and I are to—”

  “All those years I envied Agnes and felt such bitterness toward her, or thought I did, and now I find I—simply don’t want to hurt her. Can’t bear to hurt her. You loved her once, didn’t you? And she loved you, surely—didn’t she? She hasn’t been well for years; she will only begin drinking more heavily—”

  “Dorothea, for God’s sake, you sound hysterical. Where are you, at home? Haven’t you gone to work? I’ll come over—”

  “No, don’t come over! Not now!”

  “You sound so upset—”

  “I am upset; we must rethink this!”

  “But I thought, last night, we’d come to a kind of conclusion—”

  “Did you say anything more to her, last night? When you went home?”

  “No. Not to Agnes. But to you, Dorothea, I mean—I talked to you—I thought we’d come to a kind of conclusion, Dorothea, didn’t we?” There was a pause; Charles Carpenter was breathing heavily, like a man who has been taxed to the limit. This side of him, this sense of an impatience, even anger, barely restrained, was new to Dorothea Deverell, and intimidating. “And now,” he said bitterly, “now you’re withdrawing from me. Now you mean to deny me.”

  “I certainly don’t! I love you. But there is Agnes, she does exist, other people do exist in the world, and we can’t simply trample over them. Only think,” Dorothea said in a hoarse frightened voice, “of how, at this moment, she must feel!”

  “I’m thinking rather more urgently of how I feel,” Charles Carpenter said.

  “But I—” Dorothea began.

  But in that instant the line went dead: for the first time in Dorothea Deverell’s life someone had hung up on her.

  A few days after Colin Asch’s visit with Dorothea Deverell a packet came for her, special delivery, containing a sample of the invitation card Colin meant to send out to the guests for Dorothea’s dinner party.

  Colin Andrew Asch

  requests the pleasure of your company

  to celebrate the appointment

  of Dorothea Deverell

  as Director of the Morris Brannon Institute

  on Saturday, March fifth, nineteen eighty-eight

  at 1104 Normandy Court, Lathrup Farms, Massachusetts

  R.s.v.p.

  Eight o’clock

  Telephone: 617-555-5825

  Black tie

  The paper was stiff ivory; the print elegantly, one might say a bit pretentiously, engraved. Holding it in her hand, Dorothea laughed aloud in embarrassment. “This is impossible.” Why did that good-hearted young man forever teeter on the brink of absurdity, making too much of too little, pouring his emotions into vessels too frail to contain them? In his letter he requested from Dorothea a list of people to whom he should send invitations; informed her that, on the evening of the party, a chauffeured limousine would pick her up and bring her back home; and that, if she had liked it, and if she was “so disposed,” she might wear to the party a “recent Christmas gift, from an anonymous admirer.”

  “Impossible!”

  When, however, Dorothea telephoned Colin Asch to protest, as diplomatically as possible, the unneeded formality of the invitation and its “self-congratulatory” tone, he countered with the argument that the appointment was an honor and she was to be publicly congratulated. “You are not congratulating yourself, after all; it’s your friends who are doing so.” Dorothea had not the heart to tell him that, indeed, a banquet of sorts in her honor was being organized by the Friends of the Brannon Institute for early September after Howard Morland officially retired, and that other dinners and gatherings of an informal nature were planned, and would be planned—Lathrup Farms being Lathrup Farms, after all. In an outburst of defensiveness, as if Dorothea had challenged him on some very deep issue, Colin told her that everyone to whom he’d spoken about it thought it was a great, a fantastic idea, and his Aunt Ginny was frankly jealous. “She tried to preempt my party, in fact—‘Why don’t we do it at my house, Colin, we have more room over here’—but I told her absolutely not. It’s my idea and my apartment. It’s my celebration dinner for you.”

  Dorothea gently objected that she found the very idea
of a celebration embarrassing; Colin Asch said at once, with the energy of a high school debater, speaking rather loudly into the phone, “But embarrassing for who? Whom? You can’t think exclusively of yourself at such a time, Dorothea, you have to think of your friends too, don’t you? Like, they want to honor you, they’d be cheated if you backed out—right? It’s like certain great people who die, you know, and say in their wills they don’t want any funeral or fuss; in a weird way it’s sort of selfish, I always thought, to deprive people of—you know, certain ceremonies. What would human existence be like, Dorothea, without ceremonies? I don’t mean crap like Christmas, Easter, that worn-out dead kind of stuff; I mean, you know, something living, springing from the heart—”

  So in the end, fairly bludgeoned by her young friend’s passion, which after all outweighed her own aversion to the project, Dorothea Deverell gave in and withdrew her objections. Even to the slightly silly formality of the card. Even to the admonition “black tie.” She neglected to mention the limousine, and the Christmas gift, the lovely white lace and wool outfit—though she intended, at the time of the party, to consent to neither. Her primary anxiety about the dinner was not in fact such details but the guest list: whether she dared invite Charles Carpenter without inviting Agnes, and without Agnes’ knowing about the party; how, given the protocol of such things and the endogamous nature of social life in Lathrup Farms, the finesse might be managed. Though Charles Carpenter was still furious with her and might refuse to come in any case … he loathed black tie occasions. And matters at the Carpenters’ home were, as he grimly and accusingly said, at an impasse.

  In the end Dorothea decided simply to invite Charles, by himself, with an invitation sent to his office. Perhaps, by March 5, he would have forgiven her.

  8

  What? do you want of me, Colin? she’d asked, raising her lovely troubled eyes to his, and without thinking he told her what was in his heart surging and pulsing in his blood strong enough to choke him I don’t want anything of you Dorothea only that you exist, that our lives are parallel and so saying he saw the happiness lighting up in her eyes like sudden candle flame. Backed away trembling in dread of being drawn by those eyes into saying more, revealing more, before she was prepared to hear.

  “I was only the agent—yours.”

  Subsequently he would record in the Blue Ledger:

  Parallel lines never meet!

  Except in the eye!

  —like at the horizon!

  Thus in the eye of the mind parallel lines NEVER FAIL to meet!

  He’d subsequently record too in abbreviated codified fashion how he had driven off from 33 Marten Lane, then parked the Porsche (which was handling beautifully—a dream car at last) on a side street then doubled back as he’d done in the past always with conspicuous success having calculated the most direct route that answered to the demands of safety and common sense through Dorothea Deverell’s neighbors’ back yards, in only one instance a dog yapping like crazy in what looked like a glassed-in rear porch—but maybe nobody was home?—but anyway C.A. never hesitated never panicked knowing this was a special night for him nothing can touch you at certain illuminated times when all that is “out there” emanates in fact from the soul … just jogging along like he’s a weird local guy actually jogging … except not on the street but across the back yards of his Lathrup Farms neighbors … in six-inch crusty-icy snow in new Nike running shoes and no socks. So you get a little snow in your shoes, what the fuck: “The main thing is, it’s healthy.”

  At the rear of 33 Marten Lane, Colin Asch stood panting, staring into the warm-lit interior of the very living room in which Jesus! wild! he’d been sitting in a few minutes before what a weird shift of perspective! except now Colin Asch was gone, also Dorothea Deverell was gone, that very sofa with the little pillows perpendicular to the fireplace, and the rose-colored chair in which she’d been sitting smiling at him her sherry glass held in both hands her mood gay, bright—How beautiful she’d said, taking the gladioli from him thank you so much Colin, you shouldn’t have—and the gladioli were there in the tall cut-glass vase proudly on the mantel but Christ! how weird it all looked from outside the window like he almost could (like when he was acting, on stage) watch himself perform from outside himself. He’d forgotten the fucking binoculars. Thus had to approach the house closer than the other times. Crouching just outside the terrace window, the big plate glass window that was the entire wall on that side.

  D.D. had gone upstairs maybe but he waited, C.A. had all the patience in the world, warmed now by the sherry she’d given him, the cookies, the taste of the sugar still in his mouth, crystals on his tongue, all the patience in the world there’s a certain holy quality to this: shadowless and they’d shaken hands goodbye, her eyes shining with affection for him and approval of him Just to know that you exist and she’d said I feel the same way about you—you’ve put it very gracefully. Thus he waited, and after a while D.D. reappeared, looking young as a schoolgirl in a plaid pleated skirt and yellow sweater but unsmiling now, worried, distracted, the man who was her secret lover was on his way but it was not a visit that promised pleasure, or solace—“Could be he’s giving her a hard time.” Colin Asch felt a stab of hurt and resentment when Dorothea removed the vase of flowers, his flowers, from the mantel, carrying them out of the room as if by a directive of the invisible lover.

  (Whom he guessed to be the man whose name she’d uttered, “Charles Carpenter,” the friend of the Weidmanns’—middle-aged cautious-looking sort of Englishy fucker, lawyer, well-to-do—of course Colin Asch remembered him, never forgot a name; and the wife, Agnes. Had the audio equivalent of a photographic memory: perfect recall. He had tricked D.D. into saying the name aloud: “Charles Carpenter.” And shrewdly he knew by her liquidy gaze and the softness of her voice, That’s him! that’s the man!—for it’s a fact that when you’re in love with someone you say the name as much as possible, for instance at the present time Susannah Hunt was in that stage where she said his name constantly—“Colin, Col-liin”—sort of mock-crooning, caressing, teasing, parodying (lest her young lover beat her to it: S.H. was the kind of woman who’d had some bad experiences with younger lovers, Colin could sense) some of the things they were doing, or maybe just the fact that they were doing them at all plus saying the usual words like I love you I’m crazy about you like you’re so beautiful like Oh God that was wonderful like nobody had ever said such words before but you had to believe they were true, and wanted to.)

  And there suddenly the man was, in Dorothea Deverell’s living room where, a short while previously, Colin Asch had been: Charles Carpenter himself. Looking taller than Colin remembered. And so earnest. So excited. A drink in one hand, and his other hand grasping D.D.’s, dragging her along. As if he had the right.

  Thus Colin Asch was forced to crouch shivering in the snow amid the sharp-needled evergreens while inside the lovers had their surreptitious meeting—an assignation it would be termed—sometimes kissing, embracing … then drawing back again to talk … and D.D. was crying it seemed … and Carpenter tried to comfort her when it was obvious he was the one causing her grief—hadn’t she been radiant with happiness a short while before, in Colin Asch’s company?

  So he watched. Couldn’t hear what they were saying. Not even their voices, which were seemingly raised now and then. You had to figure it: the fucker was a married man cheating on his wife, thus disloyal, dishonest; D.D. was foolish to trust him; didn’t trust him, probably; if she was happy with him with being in love with him why was she so agitated now? Why was her face shining with tears? And she’d hidden Colin Asch’s gorgeous flame-colored gladioli for this man.

  How long this went on, the two of them talking, embracing, kissing, Colin Asch could not have said, an hour perhaps, or more; he’d slipped into a trance like dreaming with his eyes open not minding that his feet were fucking cold and there wasn’t any moon to soften things, staring at the man and woman inside the house only a few yards away but
distant … this weird sensation rising in him like almost coming in his pants like observing a target ignorant of being observed thus your power is infinitely magnified while theirs is diminished to the point finally of extinction. Then abruptly the two of them got up from the sofa and left the living room, passed out of Colin Asch’s vision, so he climbed up onto the terrace to look inside—couldn’t see them—in a reflex gesture tried the door: but naturally it was locked. (The kind of lock he could jimmy open, though, in maybe thirty seconds.) Was Carpenter leaving finally? Or were they going upstairs to D.D.’s bedroom? Colin backed off from the house, sliding and stamping in the glazed-over snow to disguise his footprints, but he couldn’t hear voices at the front door or the sound of a car door being slammed and so forth, which meant the two of them had gone upstairs leaving him behind in the freezing cold like a mongrel dog, not that a dog would be treated with such insult—it was the time of evening when human beings sat down together to share a meal, to partake of a ceremony, not be kicked out into the fucking arctic cold, and he’d had the distinct impression she was meaning to invite him to dinner, of course she was meaning to invite him to dinner, after the tour of her house, then the fucking phone rang, then it was him—Carpenter—the fucker. In a sudden rage that came over him like a spasm of hiccuping he thought of hiding in Carpenter’s car in the back seat and when finally the bastard got in and drove off he’d allow him to get a certain distance then at a light or something he’d just reach up and around and get him in a choke hold the kind that the police are trained to use pressing on the carotid artery to cut off circulation to the brain, one two three four five! presto!—then just calmly get out of the car and walk away—“Sure, I could do that. Easy.” But he had an even more convincing flash like a dream of him ascending the stairs in the house moving like a sleepwalker like Shelley who said I go my way like a sleep-walker until I am stopped and I never am stopped up the stairs into her bedroom where it would be darkened but he’d see them clearly the two of them asleep, naked after love, lovemaking though in truth it was unimaginable that Dorothea Deverell would do such a thing really nonetheless he saw them asleep and he saw himself standing over them and he had a knife in his hand, or a razor … and as Charles Carpenter slept Colin Asch gracefully sliced his throat—it was part of his pride to do things with grace like they were effortless though all of his life, his ingenuity, his physical conditioning went into the smallest gesture!—and somehow Carpenter just bled to death without waking … nor did she wake … for he could not imagine it, could not imagine any of the scene, except that she continued to sleep oblivious of what Colin Asch was doing, of what must be done for her own very sake: her happiness.