The (Other) You

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Assassin. Assassin! I was slow to realize and to accept as you would be if you won a lottery and did not dare to believe. Have I—won? The winner is—me?

  Almost, I could hear the crowds applauding on the TV.

  Hateful arrogant son of a bitch the P.M. was, you saw clearly on TV. A bachelor, he was—never married. No worse than any of them in any of the “political parties” but the P.M. is the top dog deserving of his bloody head sawed off. And fitting, the very person who scrubbed his filthy toilet should be the one to saw it off.

  You see, no one notices us. This will be our revenge.

  Short squat middle-aged female like Priss Reents/me moves through the world invisible. She/I have bunions, varicose veins, swollen ankles. She/I are short of breath making our way upstairs. Hell, we are short of breath making our way downstairs. Not five feet three, 170 pounds. No one has glanced at us in decades. Not a man or a boy in memory. We are deserving of respect as any of you yet we do not receive your bloody respect so bloody hell with you.

  In fact, this is our strength. An assassin in the figure of a middle-aged cleaning woman flush-faced and panting on the stairs, breasts like balloons collapsed to her waist, fattish thighs and buttocks in a nylon uniform—who’d suspect?

  What, are you daft, man? That cow? That’s the cleaning woman for Christ’s sake, man. Let ’er through.

  Something like this it was, that transpired that morning. Very cleverly I ground up a half-dozen sleeping pills to dissolve in Reents’s coffee which the woman so dilutes with cream and sugar it is not even coffee any longer but some disgusting sugar-concoction. And they are trying to say to me, that I am the one who is pre-diabetic.

  And so, there was no difficulty for me to put on Priss Reents’s uniform when she was fast asleep and snoring with her vast mouth agape, and indeed the stretch-waist nylon trousers fitted me like a fist in a glove. No difficulty for me to impersonate Priss Reents who is near-enough to me to be a twin sister. So that even if a security guard had thought to actually look at me, he’d have seen Priss Reents and not me for it was Priss Reents’s I.D. photo pinned to my bosom slumping to my waist and he would not have given that I.D. photo a second glance either out of repugnance for that sort of female bosom. Also, Priss Reents wore an insipid knitted cap to disguise her thinning hair, which suited me, too. OK, ma’am. Go on through.

  If a man does glance at you, if you are Priss Reents/me, his eyes are glazed with boredom. Not for an instant does he see.

  Waved through security without a hitch. Exactly as planned. Dragging a vacuum cleaner on wheels, mop and bucket, canvas bag in which were stuffed sundry cloths, brushes, and cleaning materials. From innocent queries posed to Priss Reents I had ascertained which corridor to take into the P.M.’s private rooms, and there swiftly I left behind the cleaning items and sought out the bloody bastard in the swanky interior, for whom I was feeling a fierce hatred as if, in a dream of the night before, the P.M. had insulted me to my face as so many others have done. You would be surprised as I was, how swiftly I moved on my swollen ankles. Which would make me realize, in reflecting back over this episode, how the assassination was a foregone conclusion, like a final move in a chess game, except until just recently the assassin had not been named. And I would wonder if they had sought out others as the assassin in this case, and these others had proved inferior, and so they had settled upon me with the knowledge that I would not disappoint. For they must have known of me—my previous life, my education that had come to nothing, the sharpness of my intelligence blunted by myriad disappointments of which not a single one was my fault. In the man’s bedroom, in his (black silk) stocking feet, there the P.M. stood before a three-way mirror frowning as he buttoned a crisp-ironed white cotton dress shirt with his back to the door unsuspecting, for Priss Reents would never have dared enter any room in the residence without knocking meekly beforehand and if there was no knock, there could be no intrusion; if no intrusion by a stranger, there could be no sudden blow to the head from behind, so swift rushing into the penumbra of the mirror there was no chance for the targeted one to draw a breath, to escape the hard blow of a pewter urn selected from a mantel, fairly cracking the eggshell-skull in that moment. You will know what to do, as you do it—the hissing voice had instructed out of the radiator, and so it was, in an adjoining kitchen there were fancy sharp knives on a magnet-board, and of these I selected a knife with a double serrated blade, and for the next half hour or more I was engaged in sawing off the head of the bloody P.M. as he lay helpless on the floor on a fancy thick-piled carpet. This “career politician” (as he was known) who had so many enemies in our country, any number of them would rejoice in my actions and thank me for my patriotism. To sever a (living) head from a (living) body is no easy task and it is very bloody and tiring as you might imagine but the P.M. was deeply unconscious from the blow to his skull and could put up little resistance.

  The Head (as I would call it) was mine as soon as the Head was cleanly severed from the body. It was larger than you would think, and it was heavier. And very bloody, with veins and sinews and twitchy nerves dripping nonstop from the ragged neck. And the skin of the face was coarse and darkening, as with chagrin. And the eyes were half-shut, droopy-lidded like a drunkard’s. And the hair which was thin, grizzled-gray, and not a handsome whitish silver such as you are accustomed to see on the P.M. in his public appearances—a hairpiece which (evidently) the P.M. would fix upon his head when he left his quarters.

  “Missing your hairpiece, are you, love?”—the wisecrack issued from my lips, unbidden.

  I wondered if this would be a new trait of mine—a coquettish sort of wit. For it was very unlike my usual self in the presence of men, I can testify.

  The Head was too stunned to respond. Of the eyes, the left had all but disappeared inside its socket while the right was trying very hard to fix me in focus, to determine what was what. For the P.M. had not gotten to his position in the government without being sharp-witted. Out of kindness as much as mischief I sought out the hairpiece in an adjoining bathroom, and this I placed upon the near-bald scalp, and adjusted as best as I could, for even in his decapitated state the P.M. was something of a lady’s man.

  Almost you have to smile, to register a man’s vanity at such a time.

  Soon then, I would exit the P.M.’s chambers trailing vacuum cleaner, mop and bucket, canvas bag. And in the bag, wrapped in plastic to prevent the blood from soaking through, the Head. And a dollop of disinfectant to make the nostrils pinch.

  Leaving the P.M.’s residence, you are not scrutinized. There is only precaution against bringing a deadly instrument into the residence and when you exit it is by a different door.

  Still, it was early—not yet 8 A.M. If they’d had their wits about them they might’ve wondered why the cleaning woman was leaving so early but indeed they took no more notice of her than of a fly buzzing to be let out.

  From Priss Reents I knew that the shiny black limousine to bear the P.M. across town to the capitol building would not appear until 8:30 A.M. and so no one would miss the deceased until then.

  The headless body I had left covered with a quilt from the disheveled bed. Being headless a body is of not much interest and interchangeable with others of its sex, it seemed to me.

  In Priss Reents’s rubber-soled shoes, with Priss Reents’s I.D. photo removed from my bosom, and a coarse-knit nylon cardigan of an unusual shade of lavender, that resembled nothing of Priss Reents’s, and the insipid knitted cap removed, I took the Land’s End trolley to the end of the line. There is a place here I know, that I have not visited in years, but I’d once known well, down behind a boardwalk by the beach, in an area of the beach that is no longer much frequented, and here the Head would not be easily discovered. My plan was to bury it in the coarse damp sand with care, for this part of the assassination seemed to be left to me, to devise; as it often happens, a know-it-all will instruct you what to do but neglect to include the complete instructions, so you must sup
ply them yourself. Women are familiar with this, it was not surprising to me. The Head comprehended my plan, for the right eye was fixed upon me with alarm. Though luridly bloodshot that eye was sharp-focused. Don’t abandon me—it begged.

  Such nonsense! I wasn’t about to listen to such nonsense. In life the P.M. had had a wheedling way about him, that was often remarked upon. A right proper bastard, the P.M. One-quarter Scots blood it was said of him. One of those sly ones who would get his bloody way if you were not careful.

  So, I hid the Head in a safekeeping place behind a shuttered stall. Still in the canvas bag but it was so grimy a bag, in the most desperate eyes not worth stealing. By this time I was very hungry and so went out to have a snack on the boardwalk, then returned, and there inside the bag was the Head flush-faced and chagrined and the left eye adrift but the right eye blinking in the harsh oceanside light and accusing. Don’t abandon me. Please! Your secret is safe with me—I will not tell them what you’ve done.

  And, most piteous—Don’t bury me like garbage, I beg you.

  The Head most feared being buried alive. I took pity on the Head, for I could understand how it felt in such circumstances.

  In a few days I would come to a decision, I thought. In the meantime, the Head is doing no harm. We are in a sheltered place where there is no one to hear it, and it cannot escape (of course). I have set it on a platter, with some moisture beneath, to keep it moist, as you would keep a succulent plant moist, now the bleeding has stopped, or mostly stopped. Atop the scalp I have affixed the silvery hairpiece, as the Head is anxious not to be seen without it.

  Soon, the Head has become a familiar presence. Like a husband of many years. (Once, I’d had a husband. I think I remember this. But not the actual man, and not myself as a wife, I don’t remember.) Please have pity on me. Please love me. Don’t bury me—the Head dares to whisper.

  And—Kiss my lips! I love you. Please.

  But at this request, I just laugh. I will not kiss your lips, or anyone’s bloody lips. I am calculating where to bury you, in fact. Farther out the pebbly shore but deep enough so the gulls don’t smell you and dig you up and cause a ruckus. No, I am too smart for that. Fact is I am just sitting here having a rest, and I am thinking, and when I am finished thinking I will know more clearly what to do, and I am not taking bloody orders from you, my man, or from any man ever again.

  2.

  Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

  1.

  This matter of the face mask, for instance.

  Well—just a half-mask, a green gauze mask, of the kind medical workers wear.

  Not a full-face mask—that would be ridiculous.

  Before the floods, landslides, firestorms of the past several years Luce had (sometimes) worn a gauze mask. Not in public! Just at home.

  When it seemed to her that the wind “smelled funny”—“Smelled wrong.”

  Especially from the south. Industrial cities to the south. Hazelton-on-Hudson in Dutchess County is two hundred miles north of New York City, which means a near-equivalent distance from the industrial cities of Rahway, Elizabeth, Edison, Newark, New Jersey, and an even shorter distance, depending upon wind currents, from the notorious power plant at Wawayanda, New York, with its majestic white plumes of poisonous smoke sometimes visible to those residents of Vedders Hill who search the sky with binoculars on the alert for (visible) air pollution when the Hudson Valley Weather Air Quality Alert for Ulster and Dutchess Counties has reported a red alert.

  This mask, acquired at a medical supply store in Kingston, Luce hurriedly removes if Andrew returns home unexpectedly for her husband disapproves of what he calls her overreacting—catastrophizing.

  (Is that even a word—catastrophizing? Luce understands that Andrew means to suggest a comical tone, a sort of cartoon-rhetoric, to soften the mockery and the annoyance he so clearly feels; yet, catastrophizing also acknowledges the very real, the (surely) imminent—catastrophe.)

  Today, Luce is not wearing the mask. (Though the wind from the south does indeed smell funny, wrong. And the rank smell of the soil close about their house has returned, in fact stronger this spring.) Luce has scanned the scene with her binoculars and has discovered nothing to alarm her unduly except that repairs on the higher stretch of Vedders Hill Way, recently washed away in a mudslide, seem to have temporarily stopped. Ugly yellow construction vehicles parked haphazardly at the side of the narrow road, God-damned eyesore.

  And a fleet of jets from the military base at Fort Drummond, pass overhead with earsplitting noise tearing a seam in the sky.

  Her violin! Luce runs into her room to fetch it, quick before Andrew returns, hasn’t touched the instrument in weeks, desperate suddenly to take it up, cup it to her chin, wield the bow—snatch from oblivion a few minutes of a Bach partita she’d first memorized as a music student at Columbia, nothing more exquisite, soothing to the soul, of course her playing has deteriorated but not nearly so badly as she’d feared.

  2.

  “We will give a dinner party. It’s been too long.”

  “God, yes! But better hurry.”

  This is a joke. A mild joke, as Andrew’s jokes go. Still, Luce winces. For perhaps it isn’t funny, entirely. Luce resents such humor from her husband, at such a precarious time in all of their lives.

  In the distance, on the farther side of Vedders Hill, a rolling sound of thunder.

  Putting her in mind of the thunderous game of ninepins played by the demonic old Dutch-colonial dwarfs in the legend of Rip Van Winkle. For on their mountainside above Hazelton-on-Hudson they are living in what was once the Kaatskill Mountains, now the Catskills; in an earlier incarnation, as the Dutch village of Vedders, Hazelton-on-Hudson was likely the setting for the story of Rip Van Winkle’s near-fatal enchantment more than two hundred fifty years before.

  3.

  It isn’t that they are old. Not by the calendar. Not essentially. Not most of them. Edith Danvers, for instance, Luce’s colleague at Bard College, one of their few remaining neighbors on Vedders Hill Way, recently diagnosed with stage three colorectal cancer, is only fifty-one—Luce’s age exactly. And Andrew’s lawyer-friend from Yale, Roy Whalen, a former Olympic swimmer and longtime resident of Hazelton-on-Hudson, afflicted with worsening stenosis of the spine, is only fifty-seven. Todd Jameson, Andrew’s tennis partner, cofounder of Dutchess County Greenpeace, stricken last year with a mysterious autoimmune disorder which mimicked certain of the symptoms of lupus but was not (evidently) lupus, is just sixty—a youthful sixty. Heddi Conyer, Luce’s closest friend in the Hazelton Little Chamber Orchestra, recently diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, is only fifty-six. Lionel Friedman hadn’t been old—a youthful sixty-four. (Indeed, it is usually healthy young men, swimmers and divers, who contract the deadly N. fowleri—brain eating amoeba.) Others in the Stantons’ approximate generation whom they’d known in the Hazelton-on-Hudson/Red Hook area since the mid-1980s are reporting cases of diverticulitis, stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer (in one who hadn’t smoked for thirty-seven years), leukemia and lymphoma, failing kidneys, failing hearts, inflamed joints, neurological “deficits,” even stroke—at such (relatively) young ages! And there is the latest, shocking news of Jack Gatz, longtime Dutchess County district attorney and the best player in Andrew’s poker circle, last week diagnosed with early-onset frontal-temporal dementia at just fifty-nine.

  “As Jack deteriorates at poker the rest of us will greatly improve,” Andrew says, “—but it will hardly give us much joy.”

  “I should hope not!” Luce says, shocked. “And I hope you haven’t told Jack that.”

  With the air of an actor to whom the script has assured a perfect rebuttal Andrew says: “That was a joke, darling. In fact it was Jack’s joke, when he told us the news last week.”

  Rebuffed, Luce retreats. Laughs awkwardly, apologetically.

  In marriage as in tennis, one player is inevitably superior to the other.

  After nearly thirty years of ma
rriage Luce is never altogether certain of her husband’s tone, nor of the meaning of his facial expressions. Disdain for her obtuseness, sympathy for her naivete, affection for her good heart?

  Or all, or none, of these?

  * * *

  Thirty years ago they’d met on the steps of Butler Library, Columbia University.

  Descending the icy steps carefully yet she’d slipped, turned an ankle, would have fallen except a tall young man ascending the steps deftly gripped her arm at the elbow and held her upright—Hey! Got you.

  Blurred with tears from a cold, wet wind—(the Hudson River was only a few blocks to the west, though invisible from where they stood)—Luce’s eyes lifted in surprise and gratitude. The strong fingers gripping her elbow did not immediately relax.

  Thirty years. Her life decided for her.

  By what circuitous and vertiginous yet (seemingly) inevitable course from that moment to this as chastened wife retreats from the husband’s expression of veiled triumph—Hey! Got you.

  4.

  Initially the question is—Who in our circle will die first?

  Then—Who is next?

  Then—Don’t ask.

  Luce lies awake in the night thinking of their afflicted friends in Hazelton-on-Hudson. Beside her, his back to her, Andrew sleeps the heavy blissful sleep of the oblivious.

  Luce is concerned for her fellow-violinist Heddi but she is more concerned for poor Edith Danvers for (she reasons) colorectal cancer is more life-threatening than Crohn’s disease, which can be controlled with medication, if not cured; and Edith has long been Luce’s yoga companion, as well as her (adjunct) colleague in the English Department at Bard. Edith has been Luce’s confidante in the matter of husbands, marriage, children—her companion at Code Pink protests in Manhattan. Since her cancer diagnosis Edith has become obsessed with fear that her husband will “never touch her again,” for she will not only have to endure extended chemotherapy, she will have to wear a colostomy bag—a revelation that makes Luce tremble with indignation. (Yet: a fear of Luce’s own for she has seen that fleeting expression in Andrew’s face, of something like repugnance, at times when Luce is less than beautiful, sneezing, graceless, unkempt. When Luce looks her age.) (She has seen, and looks quickly away.)