The (Other) You

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Muffled by the hammer’s pounding the husband repeated the statement he’d given to authorities in a voice of stunned wonder: “I had no idea . . .”

  * * *

  Like nocturnal creatures they were becoming adjusted to night. By mid-autumn they might have found themselves blind in day-light like those poor mules who’d been worked for years in mines, discovered to be blind when at last they were brought back to day-light.

  Now there was a distinct solace in the passage of time, that had been loathed before. Now, there was the promise of night expanding as autumn, then winter, advanced. Ever more, each day was eclipsed by night. The couple could, if they wished, leave the safety of the house earlier—on the darkest days, when the sky was a thick crust of shale-like clouds, steely-gray, canyons of rubble, as early as six P.M. though this was a risk for (possibly) they might see someone, an individual or individuals, or an entire category of individuals, they did not wish to see.

  Discovering how certain stores were best patronized by night in any case. Safeway, Target, CVS, Home Depot, Walmart—cavernous spaces in which, in evening hours, there were no long lines at checkout counters, and rarely children. Only just adults like themselves somber-faced, pasty-skinned, pushing their carts and keeping their eyes to themselves.

  Why, we are the walking wounded! Who would have known there are so many of us.

  Sometimes in these mammoth bright-lit stores the wife might wear her stylish pinkish-gray sunglasses, for so many articles on six-foot shelves, so many competing and jangling colors, made her head ache. The husband might wear his ultra-dark glasses for his eyes were (still) reddened and swollen with a look now rather of anger and incredulity than nightgrief.

  Reduced staff at checkout counters, especially as closing hour (eleven P.M.) approached. The wife found it uncanny how, observed at a little distance, certain of the clerks stood immobile and stiff as mannequins in their sexless store uniforms; only when you approached them and triggered a motion sensor did they “wake” to attention with friendly smiles and store greetings—Hello! How are you this evening!

  As she’d disliked the largest of the stores in her former life so the wife retained a slight aversion for these in her present life, much preferring the smaller, more easily navigated Safeway which resembled in certain respects the grocery store in her own neighborhood where she’d shopped for fifteen years, yet differed enough from that store to erase, or to lessen, the wife’s inclination to unease and anxiety in a public place; her sense of being, as she’d tried to explain to the husband, unmoored, and drifting.

  (Often, when the wife spoke to the husband in a public place, in a quiet, confiding voice, the husband behaved as if he had not heard; indeed, as if there were no one close beside him murmuring into his ear. Enough times this had happened that the wife began to doubt her own existence, to a degree.)

  (Or was the husband simply becoming hearing impaired? That morning in late March when the wife had screamed to him from the room at the top of the stairs, the husband had not seemed immediately to hear.)

  One problem with late-night grocery shopping was that “fresh produce” was likely to be wilted and picked-over. “Fresh-caught fish” lay dispiritedly on melted ice, meats had turned gray. Even canned soups, a staple of the couple’s meals in front of the TV screen, were often depleted on shelves and baguettes, the husband’s favorite bread, were frankly stale. When you wanted to ask a store employee a question, there was no one in sight.

  Yet the wife rejoiced that no children rushed about at this hour. No young adolescents were to be seen. Adult shoppers appeared harried, distracted, poorly groomed and no one to be envied.

  Blessed quiet!—the wife drew a deep breath. No need to steel herself against a rude intrusion.

  Except, a minor incident, pushing her cart down the aisle of cereals between shelves of cheerily colored cereal boxes, predominantly bright-yellow, reassured that the husband, often sulky and disoriented prowling the Safeway aisles for his own particular foods which he could not trust the wife to choose, was nowhere near, the wife stumbled seeing, or imagining that she saw, a slender fugitive figure in T-shirt and jeans just ahead, slyly disappearing around a corner—“Oh! Wait! Don’t leave me—” the wife heard herself cry in the instant before all the blood drained out of her head, all the strength drained out of her legs, and the soft underside of her chin struck the cart handle, a good smack that woke her to the folly of her behavior.

  Flushed and chagrined, jaw hurting like hell, but grateful that the husband had not been a witness.

  Of course there was no slender shimmering-transparent figure in the next aisle, or anywhere in sight. The wife recovered at once, sensibly.

  Impressive, the way in which a rapidly accelerated heart on the very cusp of tachycardia begins to slow, informed by a signal from the brain, sensibly.

  Why didn’t you have two of them for Christ’s sake. If one is lost, the other will take his place, couldn’t have been that difficult to figure it out, right? Weren’t you always supposed to be smart?

  Grateful the husband hadn’t seen, would never know. Grateful.

  * * *

  But then, worse, despite the warning, recklessly the wife insisted upon returning to the Safeway because it was convenient, because the husband complained less bitterly about the selection of his particular foods in the Safeway, near the end of October on a very dark starless night when the air smelled mildly of sulphur, and the electricity in the grocery store shivered and shuddered as if it were about to go out, once again the wife was pushing her cart alone, once again grateful that the (sulky) husband was elsewhere searching for his longtime favorite brand of pickles, the wife turned a corner out of the canned soup aisle to see a lurid Hallowe’en display: stuffed scarecrow figure, carved pumpkin head grinning, baggy T-shirt, jeans, around its neck an eerily realistic noose—not a mere loop of clothesline but an actual hangman’s noose comprised of a terrifying number of coils, at least ten, fixed in place by a perfect knot.

  This time, the wife fell in a dead faint. No time to suck in her breath, cry out. Struck her head on the edge of a shelf, slid onto the floor, on her side, consciousness obliterated in an instant as a light switch is turned off.

  Waking then, faces looming above her, the husband’s sharp scolding voice—“That’s my wife. I’ll take care of her”—lifting her beneath the arms, shaking her awake, panic in the husband’s reddened and swollen eyes only the wife might have discerned if she’d been able to see. No need for anyone to call 911, the husband insisted, no need for an ambulance, absolutely not, no emergency, he would take his wife home, walk her out of the store since by this time the wife was revived, or nearly; the wife was herself again, or nearly; embarrassed at having caused a scene, attracted the attention of several shoppers, Safeway employees, more witnesses than she’d have imagined possible at this hour. Wincing with pain, right temple, right arm, fingers on her right hand felt mangled where she’d fallen on them but really, truly—she was all right, she was fine.

  Indeed the husband walked the wife out of the brightly lighted grocery store, firmly gripping her beneath her arms, holding her erect; he helped her into their car, returned to the store stony-faced and determined to retrieve the wife’s cart nearly filled with groceries at the end of aisle nine, for the husband had no intention of aborting the shopping in such a way, abandoning both their carts, squandering forty minutes’ effort, a bloody waste of time. Pushing the wife’s cart and, awkwardly, his own cart, filled with fewer items, to the checkout counter. In a loud voice insisting that his wife was all right, his wife sometimes fainted, she was on blood thinners, or maybe it was low blood pressure, or both.

  Certainly the husband had seen the scarecrow with the grinning pumpkin head, (expert) hangman’s noose around its neck, he’d even counted the number of coils, ten coils, all in an instant, scarcely blinking he’d seen, he’d understood, took charge, wresting the narrative into his own control, where it belonged; as he’d taken control
of the grocery carts, maneuvering them together to the checkout counter, completing the shopping on this Thursday night but it would be the last time at God-damned Safeway, that was certain.

  IT BEGAN TO HAPPEN THEN, she hated him. The husband—him.

  Ceased speaking his name, indeed ceased thinking his name as (she realized) he’d ceased speaking her name months ago. In any case night made “names” ridiculous. The redundant is by nature ridiculous. Night swallowed, enveloped, rendered redundant and ridiculous the preoccupations of day-light—distinctions of identity. Why did anyone care in the slightest who they were, or who anyone was? As the husband would say scornfully what did any of this matter? Only the drop matters.

  The drop is all that matters. Too close to the floor, your neck isn’t broken in an instant, instead you die a slow death by strangulation. Too far to the floor, the weight of your body can cause your head to be wrenched from your body, decapitated. Gushers of blood, to the ceiling and beyond.

  (Such astonishing instructions, on the Internet! They’d discovered, or rather the forensic specialists had discovered.)

  Hating him, a humid sort of hatred, as a seed falls through a crack in pavement but becomes germinated nonetheless, pushing up, upward, blind, eyeless, in a perverse tropism. Hating him, wandering in the night in the back lot of their property, grateful for a starless night, moonless night, groping her way. Smelling the dark wet earth beneath her bare feet, her heart leaps with something like hope—she is alive, that’s to say she is alive; but the sensation soon fades for he will be calling to her pettishly, he will be seeking her out, his companion in nightgrief, he will not allow her to escape. He is one who never forgets a grudge, his hurts are boils and bunions upon which his (ungainly) feet insist upon walking. The wife is aghast to discover that the husband, a fastidious man in his former life, has let his toenails grow in this posthumous life, thick as horn, deformed, surely painful; she wonders if the (ingrown?) toenails might become infected, abscessed, and in that way the husband will begin to die; a lengthy, awkward, improvident and spiteful way of dying that was, in its way, a refutation of his former efficiency. As if declaring, sneering—You would like me to kill myself more readily but I will take my time.

  But if you want to die, go ahead. No one is stopping you.

  * * *

  But it is to be nothing like this. For the second time within a span of 237 days, the wife is astonished.

  The room at the top of the stairs. The room never (again) to be opened.

  After the last of the investigators had left. After everything to be removed from the room had been removed. A confused memory of the emergency medics who’d been the first to arrive, the first of the strangers, the first to intrude, shockingly young, balletic in their grace, shouted words, commands, descending the stairs with the slender broken figure on a stretcher, belted in place. There was something tender in such care, in such dispatch. But the wife remembers mostly the silence of the young medics for words are mere sounds even when shouted, and fade rapidly.

  Pressing her ear against the door. For some reason lifting herself onto her toes, as if this might help her hear. How long she has been pressing her ear to the door, she could not have said.

  Yes, she can hear—faint music on the farther side of the door, his music. Never before had she listened to his music, which had (vaguely) repelled her. Almost she can hear—is it breathing? Of all sounds the most miraculous.

  From the foot of the stairs the husband calls to her. “What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”—he is excitable, frightened. His words are slurred for he has been drinking whiskey. He has been taking more than his share of the barbiturates. His eyes burn red with rage and bafflement and so quickly she calls to him—“It was not your fault.”

  She sees how he recoils from her. She sees that his (male) grief is rapacious, never to be satisfied. In a quavering voice he mocks her—“No. It was not your fault.”

  Then climbing the stairs to stand beside her, panting. It has been forbidden to open the door, to enter the room, there has been no need to speak of it, each has understood, and indeed the wife has not even thought of opening the door and betraying the husband’s trust. Only just pressing her ear against the door, holding the breath in her lungs, listening. At first the wife expects the panting trembling husband to strike her but instead the husband gropes for her hand. It is a shock to her, the husband no longer looms over her, a threat. In his stocking feet he is no longer a tall man. His back broken, he is no longer a tall man. His hand gripping hers, not in recent memory has his hand gripped hers, not since the late winter of the year, she’d have thought that the husband would want to break the mangled fingers of her hand but no, he only holds the fingers, there is gentleness, almost timidity in his hand closed about hers. And so, blameless they stand at the top of the stairs side by side, virtually of a height. Blameless they will forgive each other, she supposes. They have no one else to forgive.

  Final Interview

  1.

  You have arrived alone at the Purple Onion Café. Not long after noon judging by the position of the sun in the sky.

  No idea why, why here. Why heavy hiking boots which would make running difficult if you had to run. And this ticking in the air close about you like the quivering of insects’ wings, so small the human eye can’t detect them.

  Seated at a table near the rear of the (busy, bustling) terrace.

  Where the ticking has followed you. Louder.

  No idea why, but has to be here. And why now?—after so many postponements, has to be now.

  Waitress approaches to take your order. Young, shimmering-blond hair. Bare legs. Bare feet in sandals. Eyes slide onto you with an expression of surprise. Female disdain. That look you’ve seen so many times in your life almost it’s reassuring—You are in the right place. This is the right time.

  2.

  “D’you mind if I record our conversation?”—X fidgets with his iPhone.

  Why the hell would I mind. “Of course not. That’s fine.”

  “Did you say—why?”

  “What? No. I said fine.”

  Making an effort to disguise your irritation. Making an effort to appear courteous.

  (Fatuous question, an interviewer asking if an interviewee minds their conversation being recorded!)

  “Some people do mind,” X says defensively, as if you’ve spoken aloud, “—they object to being recorded.”

  You let this remark pass. Seething anger, quick as a spurting artery. But no. An error to reveal your emotions to a professional journalist.

  “In any case,” X persists, with that wide wet smile like a disinfectant swab across your raw brain, “I am not in the habit of misquoting those with whom I speak whether I ‘record’ or take notes the old-fashioned way.”

  X speaks English as if translating from another language. The German-inflected accent is particularly grating since you know that X was born in the United States.

  Again, you say nothing. Noting that it is (already) 12:34 P.M. Four minutes into the scheduled interview. You know that X was informed by your publisher that he could have only one hour for the interview, the excuse being that you have another appointment shortly afterward, and so must end your conversation with him promptly at 1:30 P.M.

  This way you will not be considered rude. Only just a busy man, practical-minded, expedient. Despite your reputation as a reclusive individual of “poetic” erudite texts.

  But now, X has thought of a new way of annoying you. A small mean light glimmers in his rodent eyes.

  “I’d meant to ask you—is this the café where a suicide bombing took place?”

  “‘Suicide bombing!’ No.”

  It’s a quick retort, reflexive as a sneeze. Almost, you feel the instinct to reach into a pocket, rummage for a tissue to wad against your eyes.

  “No? Really? It was an outdoor café, I think. Here in Santa Luce. With a name like—‘Purple Onion’ . . .”

  Does this terrib
le person mean to torment you? As if there could be another restaurant in Santa Luce with a name like Purple Onion!

  Since his (several-minutes-late) arrival X has been glancing about the bustling café terrace. As if, the fool, he might be in actual danger in such a banal place. (Most of the luncheon patrons are women. A tribe of well-to-do, very fit, streaked-blond “youthful” women whose laughter hurts your brain like the sound of crystal being shattered in manic repetition.)

  Can’t determine if X is serious about this concern or merely being comical. X’s face—which is unusually long and droll, with a high dome of a forehead and thick tufts of eyebrows—is markedly expressive, like a mime’s. Fatuous behavior can sometimes conceal genuine anxiety, as you know as a “keen observer” of human psychology, so you make an effort to be patient with X.