Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “How do you know—why do you think—something is wrong?” Colin Asch challenged her.

  “You seem so—”

  “You know something is wrong,” Colin Asch said reprovingly, letting his duffel bag fall at his feet, “so why ask?” But he sat on Dorothea’s sofa heavily, as if suddenly exhausted, his shoulders hunched and his head lowered, turning his head in jerky little tics from side to side as if he were trying to ease its stiffness. Dorothea could hear him panting and seemed to sense, from a distance of several feet, the powerful emanations of heat that rose from him. Even as she ventured to take a seat in a chair facing him Colin Asch got abruptly to his feet, as if too restless to remain in one place. “You left this open,” he muttered; he strode to the terrace door, and shoved it shut, and locked it. Then, for a brief moment, he stood at the plate glass window staring out. What did he see? Did he see anything? Beyond the young man’s tall, rangy, somehow electrified figure the solace and simplicity of Dorothea Deverell’s garden—the evergreens and newly leafed deciduous trees, the whitish slanted sunshine itself—seemed now remote, inaccessible. Something terrible has happened, Dorothea Deverell thought. And I am involved.

  Yet with reasonable calmness she asked, “Colin, what is it? Please tell me.”

  “Oh, I think you know,” he said quietly.

  “What, Colin? I didn’t quite hear.”

  “I think you know, Dorothea.”

  “Know? Know what?”

  He rattled the handle of the terrace door, saying, “This is the kind of lock that burglars can force easily. It isn’t a safe or a smart kind of lock.”

  He returned to Dorothea’s sofa and sat, again heavily, sighing, belling out his cheeks, in a juvenile expression of extreme fatigue. But his skin was flushed with excitation; there were slight tremors in both his eyelids. With increasing uneasiness Dorothea waited for him to explain himself but instead he made a desultory show of examining books on her coffee table—a gigantic Matisse with hundreds of color plates, a well-worn paperback of Montaigne’s Essays. (Dorothea had brought the Montaigne back with her from Vermont but had never quite finished reading it.) Colin frowned over the Essays; said, with no transition, “Except for today, I mean—this morning—not that; that was only a mistake.” He paused, watching Dorothea. “The other two, I mean.”

  Dorothea said, swallowing, “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Colin.”

  “Don’t you!” he laughed. Then: “Who did you say was coming here today? You said somebody’s coming? Is it Carpenter? Him? When is he coming?”

  “At—at five.”

  “Is it Carpenter?”

  Dorothea winced inwardly at the name, so unceremoniously uttered. “Charles Carpenter, yes.”

  “He’s coming at five?”

  For a long strained moment Colin Asch stared at Dorothea as if he were trying to determine whether she lied or spoke the truth. Dorothea was beginning to be seriously alarmed. He has hurt someone, she thought. Or someone has hurt him.

  “He’s a friend of mine too but he doesn’t know it,” Colin Asch said slowly. “He thinks—I can sense that he thinks—he doesn’t like me.’”

  “Of course Charles—”

  “He doesn’t know me. He’s prejudiced.”

  “Oh, but I don’t think—”

  “But you’re my friend, Dorothea, aren’t you? and I can trust you?”

  “Of course, Colin, you must know by—”

  “You can trust me.”

  “Yes?”

  Seeing Colin Asch’s look of bravado and hurt Dorothea Deverell felt a sudden urge to go to him, to lay a hand on his overheated forehead and brush his damp hair from his eyes. How unlike his usual composed self he appeared, how raw-edged, how without defenses! Yet she was not so forthright a person; she remained seated, fixed in place, staring, in dread and fascination.

  “No, I have to modify that, I’d have to say that you are my only friend, Dorothea,” Colin Asch said, shaking his head gravely. “Not Charles Carpenter. Not now, and maybe never. And I don’t trust him—how the fuck could I trust him—he’s a lawyer, isn’t he? And a lawyer is an officer of the court, isn’t he? Isn’t that his allegiance?”

  “Colin, dear, please—you’re frightening me,” Dorothea Deverell said. She would have risen from her chair but she seemed to know that the sudden movement would upset him; and she had after all nowhere specific to go. “Can’t you tell me what has—”

  “Dorothea, I’m just not happy!” he said petulantly. “For years, in school, I was the good boy, the ‘little angel,’ the superachiever, and now, headed for thirty, I’m getting frankly tired—I mean spiritually and morally and not just physically tired—fucking tired. This constant pressure to excel, to claw my way to the top. Competing with people who might be friends, forced into savage competition hike you are in a mercenary society like ours—it’s invariably the shitty end of the stick for someone who’s sensitive. I know you probably don’t feel it, Dorothea, you’re different—you’ve always been different; you hold yourself above such things—but I feel it—Christ, do I feel it!”

  Dorothea said, inspired, “Did you quit your job, Colin?”

  “Yes,” Colin Asch said vehemently. “I quit my job.”

  “But—so soon?”

  “Quit Elite Models—‘Elite Models’!—Friday morning, in the midst of a big-deal shoot! Told them all to go fuck and just—quit. Walked away.”

  “But, Colin, I thought you—”

  “No, I never liked it, Dorothea: I loathed it. Peddling my flesh like I was some kind of—meat, or a prostitute, or something. I saw the look in your eyes when you examined the photographs, Dorothea, I saw; it was for that revelation I came.” He paused, breathing hard; he was rummaging through the duffel bag at his feet. Dorothea could not imagine what connection there might be between the young man’s fierce contemptuous words and his pawing about in the duffel bag, but she sat watching, fascinated. He has hurt someone, she thought calmly. It is for that reason he has come to me.

  “Y’know this Roman emperor Caligula, Dorothea?” Colin said conversationally. “My teacher Mr. Kreuzer—Mr. Kreuzer was headmaster of the school but he taught English too—he told us how Caligula said he regretted ‘the world didn’t have a single neck so he could strangle it’—wild! That stayed with me all these years: ‘a single neck so he could strangle it.’ I know you won’t agree—you’re so good, so nice—but that’s the way a lot of people feel a lot of the time. Winding up invariably with the shitty end of the stick year after year.”

  And then he spread out on the carpet the several items he wanted Dorothea Deverell to see and was gazing expectantly up at her, his pale eyelashes trembling and his eyes brimming with moisture. In that instant Colin Asch reminded Dorothea Deverell of her mother’s father, elderly, partly paralyzed, aphasiac after a severe stroke, gazing up at her from his hospital bed with his single sighted eye and waiting with intense excitement for her response.

  A pair of man’s gold cuff links, a smart new-looking man’s leather wallet, a square-cut jade dinner ring edged with small diamonds—how could Dorothea respond? What could these items possibly mean? “My treasure, Dorothea,” Colin Asch said, lightly mocking “for you.”

  The beautiful dinner ring, so large as to resemble costume jewelry, did look teasingly familiar to Dorothea; the other things meant nothing at all. She smiled uncertainly at Colin Asch as if this were a mere game: a riddle, perhaps. “But Colin, what are they? Whose are they?”

  Still lightly mocking, Colin Asch said, “You know, Dorothea.”

  “But Colin, I—”

  “Don’t you?”

  Dorothea Deverell, on the verge of exasperation, spread her fingers wide, helpless. “Colin, I’m afraid I don’t. I don’t know.”

  Is there an authentic premonitory instinct, Dorothea Deverell would afterward wonder, or do we simply fill in the spaces of our ignorance retrospectively, claiming a superior wisdom where there was only—ignorance?


  It was true, she had thought intermittently of young Colin Asch often that winter, and well into spring; she had brooded in her customarily inconclusive way upon certain actions of his, and certain enigmatic remarks (“Oh, you’d recognize me, Dorothea—you and I would know each other anywhere”), and had been haunted by, if not indeed frankly baffled by, certain postures and assumptions, granted even the profundity of her involvement with Charles Carpenter and with his grief and distress over his wife’s death. (Weeks after the accidental drowning it was the rude shock of its initial pronouncement that lingered, still, in Dorothea Deverell’s imagination, possessed of the nearly cryptesthetic power to arouse in her, at weak, unguarded moments, a paralyzing sense of guilt and shame.) Yet she would have to confess that she had not thought of Colin Asch in any exact, any real, relation to herself; she would have said that she did not think of the unique young man in any exact relation with anyone at all—not excluding Ginny Weidmann, his very blood kin. For surely there was something innocently transitory about him? For all the blond, muscular, sinewy physicalness of his person, something fleeting and insubstantial? To which the words “fickle” or “shallow” or “unreliable” or “uncontrolled” did not in all fairness apply?

  How very strange Dorothea Deverell thought it, that, having expressed such childlike delight in his “position” at the Institute, Colin Asch had twice failed to show up for meetings in April; what news she had of him, from Ginny Weidmann, was scattered and vague. She had the impression of a life being rapidly lived, too rapidly, perhaps; but it was not her life, and she had no right, certainly she had not the requisite knowledge, to pass judgment. For, involved with Charles Carpenter as she was, and more in love with him than ever before, she simply did not have time to think about Colin Asch, still less to worry about him. Since that peculiar episode when, unbidden, the young man had dropped by Dorothea’s house to show her those amazing photographs of himself as a model, she had heard very little of him, or from him: and had not sought him out. Maybe later, in another year, when she and Charles Carpenter were in some way settled, “established” … maybe at that time, if Charles were willing, she might befriend young Colin more attentively: invite him for dinner, include him in gatherings, help to advance and promote him. Until then, her own life and her own work claimed all her energies. And what was Colin Asch but a being sui generis, of no age precisely, speaking with no discernible American accent, possessed seemingly of no background, no personal history? “He is a will-o’-the-wisp,” Dorothea Deverell decided, as if she were affixing a label to a work of art and having done with it.

  She did not consider that in fact she has no clear idea of what a “will-o’-the-wisp” actually was; it was the lightness, the musicality of the term, that charmed her.

  Now Colin Asch sat on her sofa, smiling, watching Dorothea Deverell with moist glittering eyes, informing her in a matter-of-fact voice that he had killed both Roger Krauss and Agnes Carpenter—and he’d done it for her. As her agent. In her name.

  “Not that they didn’t deserve it, Dorothea,” Colin Asch added, with a derisive twist of his lips. “They did! Him especially! It was a pleasure, with him! The son of a bitch!”

  And Dorothea, bathed in cold as if a glacial wind had penetrated the walls of her snug little stone house, simply stared at him, her mind blank with growing horror. “What—what did you say?” she several times asked in a whisper. She could not believe Colin Asch’s words yet knew, as if a lock were clicking into place, that they must be true. She knew—yet could not believe. This so very kind so very generous so very warm and affectionate and sympathetic young man—a killer?

  What had Charles Carpenter called him? A psychopath.

  Yet Dorothea said faintly, blunderingly, “I—don’t believe it. It isn’t possible.”

  And Colin Asch said, as if reprovingly, “Look, Dorothea: there’s nothing to discuss. I mean, like, what’s there to debate? They weren’t the first people I’ve killed and I doubt they’ll be the last. You know what Shelley said of himself: ‘I go my way like a sleepwalker.… I go until I am stopped and I never am stopped.’ Sure! It’s like that! If you cover your tracks, if you’re reasonably careful and brainy—who’s to catch you? The police don’t know that much, they work with probabilities and not possibilities … probabilities, not possibilities. You supply them with some clues that fit together—with a baffle, some little story they can tell themselves—they fall for it every time; you know why?” He smiled so broadly at Dorothea, his lower face seemed nearly split in two. “’Cause they’re human! They want to believe that things add up, make sense, come neatly together. There’s never any motive for any single thing Colin Asch does that anyone could calculate, which is why nobody will ever catch Colin Asch—nobody.”

  “But why—”

  “These things I brought you, they’re mementos, the ring especially—take it, try it on! Like I said, there’s nothing for us to debate; it isn’t a matter of talk.” Colin Asch kicked the ring in Dorothea’s direction—it rolled along the carpet toward her chair. His action was the most wayward, abrupt, and unexpected that Dorothea Deverell had ever encountered in him; she couldn’t help flinching. He said, as if confidentially, “The weird thing is, Dorothea—I mean this really makes you believe in destiny, karma—the thing is, I picked out that ring in five minutes, at Aunt Ginny’s that night, y’know, when she made me join you people and sit at the table; there I was in your presence, Dorothea, without knowing you, and there I was looking at a woman’s big fancy glamorous dinner ring, with knowing her, but sort of guessing I’d get that ring one day, one day I’d slip it into my pocket—Colin Asch restoring a little balance to the world. Go on, Dorothea: try it on.”

  Dorothea was staring at the ring at her feet—a square-cut jade stone edged with small diamonds, in a white gold setting. It was exquisitely beautiful. She could not bear its lying like that on the floor; she picked it up, turned it in her trembling fingers. Yes, it was Agnes Carpenter’s; she remembered it now. “But how, Colin, did you get it?”

  “Took it.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  “Out of her bureau. In the bedroom. A fancy little jewelry box with a lock that wasn’t locked—the ring was the only thing I wanted.” He sighed and squirmed about on the sofa, as if with irrepressible energy. “Though Christ!—I could use the money.”

  Dorothea swallowed. “I mean, Colin,” she said carefully, “how did you get it? How did you get the opportunity? I don’t understand: this is Agnes Carpenter’s ring, and Agnes Carpenter is dead; she died by—”

  “She didn’t die: I killed her.”

  “You—killed her?”

  “I told you, Dorothea,” Colin Asch said, making a snorting noise, bemused, dismayed, and slapping both hands against the sofa. “I told you I killed her, and I killed the other one—who else was there to do it? Your boyfriend Carpenter? Like hell!”

  “But I can’t—”

  “No need to look at me like that, Dorothea, it wasn’t any special effort. I mean, it was easy—it’s always been easy. What’s so fucking hard is”—and here his voice dipped, and his face took on an expression of simple regret—“this sort of life here, that you have—this sort of daily life, living it, making sense of it as you go along or maybe not making any special sense of it but just—going along. That’s hard. The other is easy.”

  “You are telling me, Colin, that you actually—killed?”

  “Sure! Why not? People get killed all the time, don’t they—somebody’s got to do it!” He laughed, as if he’d said something extravagant and witty. “Once I get the idea figured out it isn’t difficult to execute it. Like, you know, making up your own movie or play in your head. Everything that exists in civilization, Dorothea,” he said, tapping his forehead, “comes from in here—the human brain. Once you get the idea, the rest comes naturally. But the idea, first—that’s the trick. That’s genius.”

  Dorothea laid the jade ring carefully on the coffee table. The gold cuff
links and the leather wallet remained where Colin Asch had deposited them. She was blinking rapidly, for her eyes were filling with tears of shock and disbelief. Was she in shock? Her hands and her feet had gone icy cold, the interior of her mouth extraordinarily dry; she feared that, if she got to her feet, she might faint; yet she had to get to her feet. She had to get away from Colin Asch—had to go for help.

  But it was Colin who rose, fairly leaping to his feet. “I’m dying of thirst!” He went out into Dorothea’s kitchen; she heard him open and shut the refrigerator door. Somehow, on tottering legs, she followed him, a terrible roaring in her ears, her vision nearly gone. “This is delicious—just what I need!” Colin said happily, drinking orange juice directly from the quart bottle. He stood, head back, legs spread, emptying the bottle.

  Dorothea felt rather than saw the floor rise swiftly toward her; there was a sharp cracking blow against the side of her head. She’d lost consciousness for what could not have been more than a split second—then woke, lying on the dining room carpet, her head ringed with pain, while Colin Asch crouched over her. Repeatedly, he uttered her name, begged her to be all right. “Don’t die, Dorothea! Don’t die!” He ran into the kitchen to dampen a towel to press against her face. When she was sitting up and had more or less recovered, he said, repentantly, “It’s my fault. I upset you, I guess. You’re a sensitive woman—I should have known.”