The (Other) You

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Andrew feels more sympathy for swaggering Jack Gatz whom—frankly—he’d always admired. For Jack Gatz had the most prominent public career of anyone in the Stantons’ Hazelton circle. The Gatzes’ house—glass, stone, redwood, burnished copper—loosely described as in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright—was the most spectacular house on Vedders Hill, indeed anywhere in Hazelton-on-Hudson, until it was reduced to an ignominious pile of rubble in the firestorm of the previous fall.

  No, Luce thinks. It isn’t that they and their friends are old. Or that they haven’t taken good care of themselves—their medical insurance allows for a generous array of mammograms and prostate screenings, colonoscopies, electrocardiograms and echocardiograms, biopsies, CT-scans, and PET-scans, MRI’s and fMRI’s . . . Roy Whalen has undergone a week of intensive tests at the Mayo Clinic, Todd Jameson at Johns Hopkins. Pete Scully, first violinist and conductor of the Hazelton Little Chamber Orchestra, is said to have dialysis three times weekly at the Kingston Dialysis Center. And their friend Samantha Plummer is scheduled to undergo the most complicated and expensive medical procedure of all—a stem-cell transplant involving a barrage of chemotherapies followed by quarantine in germ-free isolation for a minimum of six weeks in a specially constructed apartment owned by Sloan Kettering in Manhattan.

  Their friends and neighbors are collapsing all around them!—in mimicry of the collapsing roads of Vedders Hill, mudslides, flash floods, and flash fires of the past several years. It had once seemed natural that droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, torrential rainfall, catastrophic blizzards were a way of life in Western and coastal states but now such extremities of weather are afflicting even Dutchess County.

  5.

  “‘The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath toward you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.’”

  Andrew is very entertaining, and Andrew is very chilling, channeling the voice of the eighteenth-century Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards who’d reputedly terrified congregations with his infamous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. (Not aligned with any college or university, Andrew Stanton is a self-styled private scholar; his most renowned book is the Pulitzer Prize–winning An Intellectual History of America from the Puritan “City on a Hill” to the “Great Society.”)

  It’s Andrew’s (half-serious) opinion that in the twenty-first century damnation isn’t a matter of Hell but not having adequate medical insurance.

  “We are spiders dangled by fate over the fires of hell, and the slightest slip will plunge us into an eternity of misery—kept alive by machines for which we may have to pay ‘out of pocket.’”

  Andrew’s listeners laugh, uneasily. He may be joking—or half-joking—but this is the nightmare everyone in America dreads.

  Educated and enlightened individuals who have no fear of a wrathful God. No need for Jesus Christ to rescue them from this God but they do fear the tyranny of medical bills even as their medical ailments seem to be increasing.

  “The more tests, the more diagnoses. The more diagnoses, the more illnesses and ‘conditions.’ The more illnesses and ‘conditions,’ the more treatments. The more treatments, the more hospitalization and the more hospitalization, the more medical bills.”

  Oh, Andrew Stanton is very funny! With the others Luce laughs, and winces.

  We know what our punishment is, but what was our sin?

  6.

  Despoiling the one earth we were given, of course.

  7.

  Where once the soil was a solace to her, now the soil is becoming fearful to her.

  Outdoors, bright, blinding sunshine. Frantic need to get outside.

  With a hand trowel digging in rich dark soil Luce has created herself over many years of composting, but that now smells strange to her nostrils, rotting-feculent, as if teeming with microscopic virulent life.

  Global warming, Luce thinks. The hairs at the nape of her neck stir. There is no longer a guarantee of protracted sub-zero temperatures in this part of North America, that once killed off such virulent life.

  If she wears gloves, Luce reasons. If she never actually touches the earth with her bare fingers . . .

  Her mask? That Andrew has ridiculed, and that looks (she acknowledges) silly on her, should she wear that?

  Sufferers of depression are recommended gardening, music.

  Not so much reading, certainly not writing, for such exercises of the brain activate thinking. Not a good idea.

  A sensation of despair as of sand fleas crawling up her legs, a very bad memory from girlhood of long ago.

  Deciding she won’t work outdoors this morning after all.

  8.

  “Luce, darling! If you’ve started inviting people to our dinner don’t forget Lionel Friedman and—” (forgetting the wife’s name, taking for granted that Luce will provide the name, and indeed Luce murmurs Irina in a way she has perfected to inform her husband without interrupting his train of thought)—“It’s been a really long time since we’ve seen them, I think.”

  “Well—yes. It has.”

  “I’ve always liked Lionel—he’s very impressive if sometimes a little pompous. And—what’s her name—”

  “—‘Irina’—”

  “—very smart, as I recall. And a good cook. We owe them a dinner, don’t we?—I seem to remember.”

  “Yes, I think so. I think you are right.”

  “So, then—invite them, please.”

  “Y-Yes. I will.”

  No need to upset Andrew at this time of morning. Just as he is about to enter his study for a morning of work.

  It isn’t just that Lionel Friedman died eight months ago but that Andrew seems to have forgotten. And not just that Andrew has forgotten, but Luce dreads his questioning her, as frequently he does when she reminds him of something he has forgotten, suspiciously, irritably, as if she’d kept such information from him out of deviousness—Why on earth didn’t you tell me?

  Nor does Luce want to be obliged to (re)tell her husband the ghastly details of Lionel’s death, so rare and obscure a virulent infection of the brain that there was a paragraph about it in the science section of the New York Times beneath the lurid headline Increase in Brain-Eating Amoeba Cases in US Traced to Gradually Warming Temperatures.

  9.

  Do they dare? After such a long time? Not a single musical performance by the Hazelton Little Chamber Orchestra in the (disastrous) season 2018–19, and the little quartet as they call themselves, four musicians, members of the Orchestra, haven’t gotten together to play in—how long?—five, six months?—where once they’d played together every two or three weeks, and sometimes more frequently.

  First violinist of the Little Orchestra, Pete Scully. Violinist, Luce Stanton. Cellist Tyler Flynn, violist Heddi Conyers. All of them non-professionals for whom music was the unattainable career and other careers, however successful, second choices.

  Luce and Heddi have decided, the little quartet must play at the Stantons’ dinner party. Such private musical evenings were frequent years ago, everyone had seemed to enjoy them, why not resume?

  The little quartet has been working for years on several Schubert string quartets. The most challenging has been the last, most exquisite quartet—#14 in D-minor, Death and the Maiden. Often for small audiences in private homes they’d performed less rigorous quartets by Dvorak, Borodin, Brahms, but they’d never quite brought the more ambitious, emotionally grueling Death and the Maiden to a point where they’d have been comfortable with anyone else hearing it. But now, as Heddi says with a wild little laugh—“Time may be running out.”

  Luce gives no indication of having heard this remark. She shivers, and laughs—“Do we dare? So much has happened lately . . .”

  “Which is the point. We must take back control.”

  “Scully has been sick . . .”

  “I�
��ve been sick. But I’m stronger now, and I think that Pete is, too.”

  Luce hears the quaver in her friend’s voice. She doesn’t want to question whatever Heddi says, not just yet.

  “I called Ty to invite him and Glenda to the dinner and he sounded—well, surprised to hear my voice. Maybe he thought I’d been killed in the firestorm?”

  This droll remark Heddi ignores.

  “But did he say ‘yes’?”

  “Yes to the dinner party, and then when I brought up the subject of playing a little music for the guests he hesitated, then said, ‘Oh, what the hell! Yes.’”

  “That’s just like Ty! I love Ty. What about Pete?”

  “Oh, I’m sure—yes.”

  “You and I can start practicing today. Tonight!”

  “Tonight? Really?”

  “Yes. Come to my house. Andrew won’t mind in the slightest, he watches MSNBC and CNN after dinner, till midnight, and I just can’t. No more! So please come, we’ll get a head start on the guys.”

  “But—Schubert? Death—?”

  “We have three weeks, two days. We can do it.”

  “We can?”

  “We can.”

  Breathless, laughing together, Luce Stanton and Heddi Conyer. Like girls clasping hands on a high platform, preparing to dive together into the murky water below.

  “God, I’ve missed you. I’ve missed our evenings. I hardly listen to classical music any longer, I don’t know what has happened to me.”

  “To all of us! I don’t know, either.”

  “I don’t even read books. I mean—real books. Tried to reread Anna Karenina when I was in the hospital, and afterward at home, and just—could not. Like that part of my brain is wizened. Five-, ten-minute ‘reading’ on a screen is what I do now, mostly.”

  “Well, we already know Death and the Maiden. We’ve practically memorized it and we can practice together. Before we all meet to rehearse. We can listen to the Takacs recording, I’ve heard it dozens of times and it always breaks my heart.”

  “Oh God, yes! My heart, too.”

  Heddi hugs Luce impulsively. Luce is struck by how thin her friend has become, and how ivory-pale and papery-thin her skin, but still Heddi grips Luce tight, her breath is warm against Luce’s face. A single jolt of happiness runs through the women’s bodies like an electric shock.

  10.

  Is it the earth, the water, the air?—contaminates.

  Something is poisoning them. Seeping into their lungs, into the marrow of their bones.

  Brain-eating amoeba. Or is it flesh-eating bacteria. Luce doesn’t want to think.

  Jesus, darling! Don’t catastrophize!

  When they first moved from West 78th Street and Columbus Avenue, New York City, to Hazelton-on-Hudson in 1986 the air in the Hudson Valley was cleaner, the sky a brighter and clearer blue—Luce is certain. The white oaks and birches had not shed their leaves prematurely, in hot September. That maddening chemical odor wasn’t borne on the wind, and the soil on Vedders Hill seemed more solid, substantial. Mudslides were unknown, still more firestorms were unknown. An excess of pollen was a far more serious problem than a depletion of ozone. True, there were reports of acid rain in the Adirondacks and the Hudson River had been seriously polluted, like Lakes Ontario and Erie upstate, but the media didn’t make a fuss over it and social media, the vehicle for channeling outrage, did not yet exist. Everyone sailed, canoed, kayaked on the Hudson River. Fished! The river’s steely beauty prevailed.

  What have we done, what have we done!

  What have we failed to do.

  She began to have difficulty breathing at night, in bed. Sometime in her mid-forties. Lying on her back she felt particularly oppressed, as if something were squatting on her chest. But if she lay on her side, her heart beat uncomfortably.

  In the night she seemed to lose track of her identity. That she was a wife, that a sentient being slept beside her that was a husband, became an elusive fact.

  Light rippling sleep like shallow water over rocks streamed across her brain. She was trying to walk in the water—lost her balance, stumbled—woke abruptly, heart pounding in panic.

  How deep the husband’s breathing, like the breathing of one who has been transformed into pure being—unnamed, unknown to her.

  She must stumble to keep up with him—whoever he was.

  Her protector. Her superior. Though not her father sometimes in sleep he was conflated with her father.

  She was terrified of the man leaving her. Terrified of losing him.

  Recalling how on the icy steps of the library she’d slipped, turned her silly ankle, fell heavily and cracked her skull. Shiny glossy chestnut-blond hair, wet with blood. Whoever it was, the male, the husband-to-be, squatted and scooped up her suety brains in his hands.

  Laughing, for you have to laugh. All thinking matter—all of Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven—all that’s human—is but fragile brain matter encased in a crackable skull.

  In a sieve, some of the brain would leak through. Most would not, meaning—what, exactly?

  What isn’t suety, soupy—that is the soul. Gnarled like nuts. Immortal.

  Waking with a start. (Was it sleep apnea?) (Luce feared that she might be falling asleep/waking dozens of times in the night as her father had done in the last decade of his life. Injurious to the heart as to the brain, such stumblings into sleep.)

  Worse: there came a recurring dream in which Luce found herself in an airless bunker with other women, girls. Her age was uncertain. Even her name. She and the others wore shapeless uniforms of a vaguely military sort. They were required to sleep together in unmade beds. They were required to fit gas masks over their faces when sirens routed them from sleep—but Luce’s gas mask turned out to be solid rubber lacking openings for her nose and mouth, hideous.

  She struggled, tried to scream. “Luce! Darling! For Christ’s sake wake up”—Andrew shook her, alarmed and exasperated.

  Another time Luce woke panting and sobbing, having pulled the sheet up over her face as a mask to filter toxic air seeping into the room from a vent.

  “You’ve got to get control of yourself,” Andrew said grimly. “This catastrophizing is wearing us both out.”

  Luce offered to sleep elsewhere but Andrew would not hear of it. Though their lovemaking had become infrequent in recent years there was always the possibility of lovemaking, the husband in his vanity did not like to relinquish.

  Then one hot September morning before dawn they were both awakened by crackling heat, sirens, no dream but a firestorm raging above them on Vedders Hill dry as tinder from weeks of drought. Smoke, suffocating white smoke, screams of neighbors, a hysterically barking dog next door. On the narrow private road, in stretches of the most prestigious real estate in Dutchess County, fire trucks and emergency vehicles could barely move; residents fleeing the Hill were forced to abandon their vehicles and descend on foot. The Stantons grabbed clothes, shoes, wetted cloths to hold against their astonished faces. Fled the firestorm on foot descending a half-mile into Hazelton like refugees and returned five days later, when Vedders Hill was reopened to civilians, to discover a ravaged landscape—more than half the hillside houses had burnt to the ground while others, eerily, including their own, remained standing scarcely touched except for smoke-stained facades and broken windows.

  “Oh, God! Why have we been spared!”—Luce burst into tears, stricken with guilt and shame.

  Andrew, staring grimly at the devastation that surrounded them, his face ashen and his eyes bloodshot, did not seem at first to have heard. Then, uttering, without his usual jovial irony: “We have been spared? Is that what you think?”

  In the acrid air the question hovered between them. Luce thought—We will be sick with guilt. No one will forgive us.

  Accompanied by volunteer firefighters they’d been allowed to walk through the rooms of their house holding damp cloths against their faces, allowed to retrieve a few essential items—Andrew’s laptop, notebooks, checkbooks
and financial records; Luce’s violin, lesson plans, student papers. The smoke-stench lay like a haze about them and would not fade for months. (Has it ever disappeared? Or have they simply become accustomed to it, and no longer notice, as they have ceased noticing, or at least being jarred by, the ruins of their neighbors’ houses?)

  Above the Hudson River a grayish haze hovered like a crouching beast. Yet beyond this haze, a perversely ceramic-blue sky. To a blank-faced young volunteer firefighter Andrew joked that, in Christian theology, it’s a feature of salvation that the saved, in Heaven, are allowed to gaze down upon the damned in Hell—but Andrew’s remark was lost in a fit of coughing.

  Even on windless hot-summer days, on Vedders Hill there was likely to be a stirring of the air, which was sure to help disperse the smells, in time. Luce took heart, there was no need for her and Andrew to consider moving away, not just yet; even neighbors with badly damaged houses vowed to rebuild, not to “give up”—“Abandon the Hill.” Others declared bravely their intention to “rebuild”—“Reclaim.” Property on the Hill had always been absurdly high-priced, now it would be more fairly appraised, taxes would have to be lowered, a new school bond issue for Dutchess County was out of the question this year . . .

  Classes at Bard were suspended for two weeks. Luce was restless in their temporary quarters in a Marriott Inn in Poughkeepsie, with others evacuated from the Hill. She could not wait to begin the effort of clean-up, repair; with shifting crews of mostly strangers she went on missions distributing food and clothing at the Hazelton community center, driving people without cars to hospitals, clinics. Luce was particularly good with the elderly, who were grateful for any kindness, and clutched at her hands as if she were, not a middle-aged woman with a predilection for melancholy, but a young person, suffused with purpose and energy, radiantly smiling. How good it was, in these quarters, to be seen!—for even her students did not seem to see her, and her (adult) children had long ceased trying. She would even take a grim pleasure—well, not so grim: festive!—in cleaning their house, washing walls, vacuuming—simple chores for years surrendered to Guatemalan cleaning women, by Andrew’s edict. And what an ideal opportunity to toss out shabby old things—furniture, art by local artists now deceased, books unread for decades—without Andrew quite knowing; for Andrew, fatigued by the evacuation, his nerves shot, did not care to revisit the house, just yet. In the aftermath of the firestorm there were new friendships to be made among the volunteers: like matches struck simultaneously in the dark, individuals discovered one another who’d forgotten one another for years. (Even members of the Hazelton Little Orchestra who’d long taken one another for granted, or had somewhat disliked one another. What a pleasure to greet one another, and to embrace!) Luce liked it that everyone you saw on the Hill wore gauze masks, and that Andrew, if he even knew, couldn’t possibly have accused her of catastrophizing.