What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Corky looks up at Christina’s windows, facing the street. Is she watching for him?

  Corky’d like to think that Christina rents her loft in the old Germantown area a five-minute drive from his South State Street office for his sake, or for her own, a convenient place where they can meet on neutral ground: not her house (Christina lives with her husband and a thirteen-year-old son in Chateauguay, a half hour’s drive on the Millard Fillmore Expressway north of the city), and not his (Corky lives alone, still in the house his ex-wife coerced him into buying). But in fact Christina has had the loft for years, she’s a freelance journalist and seems to believe she needs private space in which to work. Corky’s wondered more than once whether other men have visited Christina here, by her invitation; whether they’ve made love to her on her creaky sofa bed, or on the floor; showered with her afterward in that antiquated stall with the jaundice-yellow tile so finely cracked as to suggest as immense spider’s web. Not that he’d ask: never. And Christina has never said. Eleven months now, and all of it serious, but there are some things they’ve never discussed.

  Corky’s feeling excited. A balloon near to bursting. Only twenty-five minutes late. It’s a gusty-sunny-glaring day, massed clouds in the east above the river, that look of somber, brooding, palpitating gray brains, but the rest of the sky a hard clear eye-piercing blue. Jesus, life is sweet.

  There’s a sexual charge just driving into Germantown. This old section of Union City, which others avoid. Winding his way through potholed streets in the shadow of thunderous Expressway overpasses and ramps—entering a seedy no-man’s-land of solidly built old brick buildings now given over to discount furniture, electrical appliances, factory outlet stores—taverns, X-rated book and video shops, porn theaters, those “luncheonettes” you find only in such neighborhoods in American cities, front window greased over as if with steam, so spectacularly crummy there’s a mystery in their very existence, how they continue, where their customers come from. And, along the riverfront, the section Corky’s considering investing in to develop, there’s this wilderness of boarded-up factories, mounds of trash, scrub trees and thistles cracking through pavement behind the ten-foot chain-link fence and graffiti-covered signs WATCH THIS SPACE! FUTURE SITE OF UNION CITY MARINA!—a federal project killed years ago for lack of matching city funds.

  Up on the Expressway billboards glare in the sun like neon. A panorama of them, a look of prosperity. WELCOME TO UNION CITY CENTER CITY NEXT EXIT. Corky narrows his eyes seeing that fucking-familiar ad he hates HEINZ MEULLER LINCOLN-MERCURY SALES RENTAL & LEASING, a crude drawing of “Heinz Meuller” with beaming eyes, pipe, friendly smile, Meuller’s an old classmate of Corky’s from St. Thomas whose guts Corky has hated for thirty years and no doubt, the memories they share, the feeling’s mutual.

  Sometimes, Corky thinks, Union City even with three hundred thousand people is too damned small for him. He’s lived here all his life and maybe that’s too long.

  Also everywhere he sees the shiny familiar red-white-and-blue signs for ROSS DRUMMOND REALTY. Drummond, biggest realtor in the region, happens to be his ex-father-in-law.

  Shit, Corky misses him. Corky’s got nothing against him.

  Christina’s slate-blue Volvo, 1990 model, is parked at the curb in front of 331 Nott. Corky smiles upward, shading his eyes trying to see if she’s at a window waving. Can’t see, sky’s reflected in the glass, broken clouds, pieces of blue, opacity. Like stained glass seen from the outside.

  Beneath the grime the brownstone at 331 Nott is a handsome, sturdy old building, German-built, 1922, to last a hundred years. In this neighborhood it won’t last another five. Now, if Corky owned it and could transport it to, say, Pendle Hill, it could be reclaimed, sandblasted and overhauled inside and out, new windows, new roof, trendy skylights, divided into condo units. But here, no. Next door, an identical brownstone’s boarded up, abandoned. Looks like shit. The sidewalk’s littered at 331 Nott, there’s graffiti, Day-Glo white, on the front door, and a pissy stench to the stoop—how Christina’s nostrils must pinch, she’s such a fastidious woman.

  Corky gives her another year or so, she’ll be gone from Nott Street.

  Living where?

  One thing you learn fast, in Corky’s trade, in fact Corky’d picked it up as a kid, nothing’s fixed or permanent or real, in real estate. Everything’s location, context. Ever-changing.

  And inside the vestibule the smell’s stronger. One time, Corky surprised two black kids, really young kids, smoking what he’d guessed must be crack, staring at him, bursting into high-pitched giggles. Not at all afraid, or giving a damn. The row of aluminum mailboxes is scratched and dented from frequent break-ins. Why Christina’s husband lets her rent down here, Corky can’t understand. If she was his wife, absolutely no.

  C. BURNSIDE 3A. “Burnside” is Christina’s maiden/professional name.

  An old Union City name, in fact. Like “Kavanaugh,” the husband’s.

  Shit on their shoes, kid.

  No longer?

  Corky buzzes 3A to let Christina know he’s here, and opens the inner door with his key. Christ, he’s excited.

  But, shit: it’s almost eleven-thirty. And he has that lunch date at one with Greenbaum. Why the fuck he had to stop at Pendle Hill to stick his nose in business not his own, he doesn’t know. Nothing means more to him than these times with Christina.

  “Chrissie?—it’s me.”

  Up the creaking, battered old hardwood stairs Corky runs, smiling, eager, he’s an upright flame, the flush in his Irish kid’s face and that lover’s glow in his eyes, seeing Christina Kavanaugh waiting for him. For him. In snug-fitting well-worn jeans, outlining the curve of hips, ass, the embroidered dusty-rose pullover cashmere sweater Corky’d bought for her at Christmas, and barefoot, despite the cold, and the crummy cracked floor of the landing—she’s staring avidly at him, or toward him, forehead creased, worriedly and, at first, not quite smiling, in that instant their eyes meet, as if she doesn’t see him.

  Fleetingly, quick as a short thread pulled through the eye of a needle, forgotten at once, Corky has the uneasy sense he’s a man rushing to fill a space, the way liquid fills a container.

  The actual space, the container, will remain invisible, as much after it’s filled as before.

  And Corky feels immense relief, too, always at this point, seeing Christina, understanding he’s come down to Nott Street with a vague superstitious dread of what he might discover in 3A. Say she isn’t on the landing. Say he opens the door. Say the loft’s quiet, empty—until Corky finds Christina’s lifeless, broken body.

  Hadn’t he had the same superstitious dread regarding Thalia, who’d laughed at him.

  Corky grabs Christina, kisses her. Hot, breathless, so hard she staggers a little, grabbing him to keep her balance. She too is breathless and seems tense, maybe she’s been worrying about him, too? Corky says, “God, you’re beautiful! I love you.”

  Christina laughs. “Corky, you’re beautiful, too.”

  That sweet sound of “Corky” in this woman’s mouth. Like her love of his body, his cock—unexpected.

  “Yes, but I mean it.”

  “I mean it, lover.”

  Up in the loft Christina examines the Chinese cat-fox Corky’s given her, kisses him again and thanks him, maybe she’s embarrassed and maybe it pleases her, anything of his. Corky glances around the loft, always a little antsy stepping in here, always the fleeting thought something will happen, somebody’s waiting for me for after all what’s he doing but fucking another man’s wife. And by premeditation.

  The stab of adrenaline, like being injected straight to the heart. The sweet rush of blood into his cock. The first few times Corky came here to see Christina, they’d grabbed at each other and begun to make love practically as soon as he’d stepped inside the door, Christina partly undressed, waiting. Hot-skinned and taut as a bow and already wet for him. And only time to talk, breathless and dazed, afterward.

  Now they have mor
e to talk about, sometimes too much. Christina telling him, as she is now, of how she’d begun to worry about him . . . just a little. Of an accident she’d witnessed on the Expressway, that morning. How she’d begun out of the blue to cry—“And you know that isn’t like me.”

  Christina offers Corky a glass of red wine, she’s been sipping some herself, the corners of her lovely mouth just perceptibly stained. They stand for a while at the rear of the loft looking out the plate-glass window, arms around each other’s waist, Corky not wanting to ask Christina about her husband but knowing he has to, it’s expected of him and really he wants to know, needs to know. How the—what’s it?—prednisone’s working out. This cortisone-like drug, new on the market, highly potent, an anti-inflammatory agent prescribed for certain multiple sclerosis patients. (Harry Kavanaugh, a former federal court justice, has had MS for the past nine years. Corky gathers it’s progressing rapidly, or Harry’s deteriorating rapidly, he feels guilty as hell about the situation, yes but there’s a sweet sort of revenge in it, why not admit it, Corky’s relations with the husbands of the women he’s had affairs with have always been rivalrous, tinged with spite. But secret. For sure, secret.) Christina never says much about Harry but always seems grateful when Corky asks, like a mother asked about an ailing, precious child. She says, “It’s one of those wonder drugs. You know—‘counter-indications’ that scare the hell out of you if you read the fine print.”

  “If you’re going to use it, maybe you shouldn’t read the fine print.”

  “Harry doesn’t. I do. But, anyway, it’s been helping him—builds up his strength, boosts his morale.” Christina pauses. Laughs. “We don’t need to talk about it any longer, lover. O.K.?”

  Corky’s thinking, say Christina was his wife, and another man was here, like this, meeting her in secret, fucking her, all very methodically, on the average three times a week for the past eleven months—how’d he take it, if he found out? He thinks of the German Luger, the heft of it in his hand.

  Except Corky’d have a hard time using a gun. On anyone. Even in self-defense.

  From Christina’s window at the rear of the loft Corky can see as far west as the Dominion Bridge downtown, and upriver as far as the suburb of St. Claire, the vague white blur of sailboats on the river. Closer in, the gold-glinting basilica of the Byzantine St. Mary Assumption Church, and, though you wouldn’t know what it was now, the ruins of the old Moneghan Pottery Works—where entire Irish families, including a number of Corky’s ancestors, emigrated to work in the 1880s. His Great-grandfather Donnelly and Donnelly’s several sisters and brothers, from County Kerry. The youngest was only ten years old and they all worked twelve-hour days. When they were lucky.

  The wide glittering river, the steep sky you could fall and fall into, no end to it. What’s the world but motion. The Universe. Immutable laws you can’t guess at. And, if you stop, the motion rolls over you indifferent as waves or clouds, you’re dead meat.

  Christina says, squeezing Corky about the waist, “Isn’t it beautiful! On these clear days, it’s like . . .” pausing breathing quickly, she’s an impulsive passionate woman prone to extravagant proclamations, “. . . some kind of God. I mean—not God as a person, but God as a presence.”

  The Chateauguay does look alive. The more you stare at it, the more mesmerized you become, it’s impossible even to determine which way the river’s current is moving, it’s so choppy in the wind glittering and winking like clusters of eyes; the darker troughs rippling like muscles. Union City is famous for its five river-spanning bridges and the experience of each bridge is different from that of the others as if each bridge traverses a river different from the others.

  Corky laughs happily. “What the hell do we need God for? Us?”

  He points out to Christina the hazy shape of a building miles away downtown, just visible beyond swanky aqua-blue high-rise towers and the ramps of the Dominion Bridge. It’s the Griswold Building, a Union City landmark, designed by Louis Sullivan and built in 1917 as the first skyscraper—what a terrific word, “skyscraper”!—in upstate New York. “See it?—I’m thinking of buying it,” Corky says casually, “—if they meet my price.” Christina expresses surprise and interest, “What a great idea, Corky, but . . .” her voice trailing off in doubt, so Corky says, as if presenting his case, “At Rensselaer I did a project on Sullivan, I actually studied the original drawings for the Griswold Building. I took photographs, I did drawings of my own. It was the first time I came into contact with . . .” Telling Christina what he’d never told Charlotte, whose enthusiasm for Corky’s schemes was tempered by her predilection for judging them, and hearing his voice Corky wonders is he saying too much, confiding too much, but what the hell, Christina is his mistress not his wife not a woman to coldcock him asking where he’d get the money even for a down payment on such an extravagance, such a whim, nor why, in this recession, anyone in his right mind would want to sink $6 million into downtown Union City when office rentals even in the high-tech upriver parks are down. “And another place I’m going to buy, y’know The Bull’s Eye? I’ve got this plan . . .”

  Can’t buy me love, can’t buy me love, oh yeah? why not?

  Before they make love, Christina examines the Chinese cat-fox Corky brought her more closely, appreciatively. If Corky’s gift-giving embarrasses her, or puts a burden on her, of feeling the necessity not simply of gratitude but of scrupulous interpretation, she’s charming enough in complying. Leaning against Corky as she turns the thing in her fingers, brushing her hair out of her face, smiling, laughing, it’s a fact that gifts reduce us to the state of being children, and in some of us this is charming, even seductive. “It’s beautiful, Corky, but what is it?”—close beside Corky whose erection is painful as a hemorrhage into his cock, two or three inches shorter than he, barefoot, a woman of thirty-six neither slender nor plump with taut rounded buttocks, good-sized breasts, her glossy black hair almost too glossy and too black in the dazzling unsparing sunshine flooding through tall curtainless windows so Corky’s lost in contemplation of her sometimes, how physical she is, how real. How can it be, Atoms are mostly emptiness, the Universe is mostly emptiness, our bodies are so real, our being irrefutable! When Corky and Christina make love on the sofa bed, sometimes more acrobatically on the matted gnarled and yellowed “Peruvian sheep-hide” rug on the floor, everything, all flesh, is dauntingly enormous, in close-up, like fucking beneath the lens of a giant magnifying glass. Corky says, stroking Christina’s breasts through the luscious cashmere, “It’s you, sweetheart, sweet pussy take a look,” nudging his head against hers as she laughs, “Oh, right! I see!—” having discovered how cleverly the cat-fox divides into two, comes apart, to reveal another, smaller cat-fox inside it, like a parody of pregnancy—and how that cat-fox too divides into two, to reveal a still-smaller cat-fox—and that too, and so on—six cat-foxes in all, each smaller and more delicately featured than its predecessor, the last only about two inches high. Slanting female eyes, luxurious whiskers, exotic markings. “I see—it’s like a Russian doll. One inside the other. It’s an ingenious idea, it must be as old as—” Christina may be about to say, the human race, but Corky takes the cat-foxes from her and drops them onto a table and kisses her, hard.

  Grips her shoulders, hard. As she grips him—his arms, his back. Suddenly, and passionately. As eager as he. As hungry.

  And what relief now, no words now, no words requiring syntax, Corky’s profoundly relieved, grateful, as grateful for this as for the sexual pleasure itself, passing into pure sensation where he’s happiest, and most himself.

  Knowing, in Christina, direct in her appetites as Corky in his, he won’t confront, as he has so often in other women, even as they melt against him, their female rage liquified for the duration of lovemaking Yes I love you and you’ve said you love me, why then can’t I trust you?

  Hurriedly, a little roughly, Corky pulls the sweater, his sweater, $300 at I. Magnin, up over Christina’s head, the two of them laughing
breathless as runners, bunching her thick hair, thick black glossy spillage of hair in his face, impatiently Corky fumbles to unhook her brassiere, the warm satiny feel of it, and Christina’s breasts heavy, always it feels to Corky’s fingers there’s milk in women’s breasts, a liquid heaviness, density, Christina’s breasts just slightly flaccid, but beautiful to him, strangely cool in his hands, the nipples honey-colored rising erect and knobby as little buttons, skin dead-white and so soft it’s astonishing, such softness such vulnerability the female so vulnerable to hurt, Corky kisses, sucks, bites, she’s told him she nursed her son when he was newly born and the thought excites Corky, they stumble together as in a clumsy dance, he tugs down her jeans, her underpants, removing his clothes with shaking fingers, he groans and presses his face against her belly, against the patchy black pubic hair, the heat between her legs, the secret moisture, kneading her thighs, her buttocks, the surprise of that fleshy solidity, Corky shuts his eyes in bliss, Oh Christ he’s happy, never so happy as at such a time, lips, tongue, teeth, fingers, his cock erect and bobbing and ropey-veined, it’s the current of the river that carries him, the bright mad tattered sunshine, the wind, many winds, pure sensation and no memory of Jerome Corcoran now, no memory of anyone and even this woman has become abstract, he enters her in triumph, exclaims as he enters her, the sharp incandescent pleasure of it, and the shock of the pleasure, always new, though so utterly familiar, so inevitable, he pushes himself into her, deep, and deeper still, falling upon her as from a dizzy height seeing her face filmed with sweat, beads of sweat at her hairline, the tense set of her jaw and the waxy-white tip of her nose, a fleeting crescent of convulsive white rimming her eyes above the irises dilated and flattened, glassy with strain, his excitement quickens as he feels her inward tightening, tighter and ever-tighter, she clutches him murmuring “Corky, my God—” the words which might be any words, a prayer, an incantation, arrhythmic and fearful, her hands clenched into fists against his back, the quicksilver rippling of her muscles, thighs gripping him with surprising strength, always he’s surprised at a woman’s strength, the urgency of it, the mounting desperation, as he plunges into her she lifts herself to him, pelvis, cunt, against him, as if into him, and at the same time hungry to swallow him up, he hears the sticky slap of their skins, he hears her, and himself, at such a time what’s required is discipline, a style, Never race a train! but Corky begins to lose it, no words and no memory and his body pumping in a frenzy as his consciousness lurches toward extinction, an upright flame flaring up, up, incandescent heat, searing white heat, the sun expanding in the bright empty sky like the eye of God, All-Seeing God, and he feels an old dread of the woman’s paroxysm, her mounting tension, the terrible violence in her as if, arching her back, grasping at him with elbows, arms, fists, she might swallow him up inside her, yes but doesn’t he love her, doesn’t he love this, this is why we’re born isn’t it, fucking, like this, the crude mute pumping, the lurch of the flesh, smelling of sweat, damp hair, tendrils of damp kinky hair on Christina’s forehead, and Corky’s arms, legs, chest, even part of his back, like wings, covered in fine frizzy red-brown hairs, patches of it in armpits and crotch, his pale pumping buttocks, the crack of his ass, how vulnerable, how exposed, something comical in the vision, sad and funny at once, Corky Corcoran too, a man’s body too, defenseless as a woman’s at such a time, it’s a perspective he can’t maintain, his brain in a swoon like frothy water swirling down a drain, he doesn’t want to come too quickly, it’s an old anxiety of his, yes but he’s urging Christina forward, in quick leaps and lunges, a woman so unpredictable, laboring sometimes for many minutes as if swimming upstream against a tough current, yet sometimes coming almost at once, the lightest touch, he feels the tension in her as a hot stabbing sensation, the way extreme heat or cold, to the touch, is pure sensation at first, not yet pain, Christina clutches at him as if to stop herself, turning her head from side to side too distracted to kiss Corky, a strange halting shyness in her often at this moment, having rushed forward impetuously and even mannishly and now hesitating, as if fearful, there is terror in such surrender of the will and Christina is a willful woman, yes but she wants it too, she wants it from Corky, hasn’t she said how she wants it, loves it, from him, yes she knows there is no way to go but forward, the Chateauguay’s swift treacherous current, the thunder of the falls downriver, no turning back, there’s a tension in the woman’s body that communicates itself to Corky, to all the cells of Corky’s body, he’s galvanized with it, he is the tension, supremely in control and guiding her even against her will, leaning on his elbows above her, cupping her thrashing head in his hands, kissing her eyelids, her forehead that’s both sweating and clammy, sucking at her mouth that seems bruised, her tongue, he feels himself floating in sky, in the reflected sky of the river, never so happy as now, if only now were forever, and no Jerome Corcoran waiting on shore, that perpetual witness. He feels Christina’s spine tightening, arching, a bow being tightened, and yet more cruelly tightened, near to breaking, and what cries will issue from her throat then, what soft-choked sobs, how she’d wept dazed and delirious that first time in Corky’s car, a wild crazy thing to do but they’d done it, and afterward she’d told him blunt and frank and unembarrassed it was the first time for her in how many years, since Harry’s condition, she spoke of it as a condition not an illness, a mysterious degeneration of the central nervous system and Corky had wanted to know but hadn’t wanted to know how long the man had been impotent No! for Christ’s sake don’t tell me! fucking Harry Kavanaugh’s wife was one thing but hearing of his doomed shrinking prick was another, with Corky, like that, coming so powerfully as that, the first time in years, her face streaked with tears and her wide gray-green eyes threaded with blood, he feels that strain in her now, the rising of tension, her hesitancy and shyness in the face of its rising, rising and now sinking and again rising, she’s helpless to stop, Corky loves this moment, these many moments, not minding her nails raking his shoulders, her blind grasping fingers in his hair, he sees the woman’s fine-boned face distended as if in a paroxysm of the air, the eyes rolling white, even white teeth and gums wetly exposed, Corky sinks himself more deeply into her, forcing himself, and forcing her to his rhythm Yes! yes! like this! gripping her tight now by the ass, kneading her ass, and how small it is in his hands, Corky’s strong impatient fingers, his penis is hammering, hurtful, he wonders how the woman dared open herself to him, spread her legs for him, so trusting, so exposed, in a woman’s place Corky would never risk it, his penis is all of him, engorged with blood, triumphant, he feels Christina on the crumbling precipice of orgasm, murmuring incoherently, a thread of saliva across her chin, strange to think this is love, love’s terrible exertion in mimicry of death, is this love?—this? Corky whispers, “Chrissie, c’mon sweetheart, c’mon I love you,” seeing her face, her straining features, in close-up, beneath the lens of the magnifying glass, fucking is so intimate, it’s a wonder anyone has the courage for it, yes but you don’t think of this beforehand, yes but you don’t think at all, Corky’s face splits suddenly into a grin, a savage laugh threatens to overcome him, he shuts his eyes and a vision flies to him, quick, instantaneous, the short thread pulled through a needle’s eye, yet he sees it complete—Christina of fourteen years before, Corky hadn’t at that time known her, only her name, Burnside, and married to a Kavanaugh, he’d seen her at a crowded party, his restless eye scanning the crowd and snagging upon her, a handsome young woman with a pale skin, very black hair, wide-set eyes and sharp cheekbones and a downturned smiling mouth, but the shock of the vision was her belly, a rounded, swollen belly, an eight-or nine-months’ pregnancy in that belly, and yet how beautiful, how beautiful, Corky hadn’t been able to look away, an elegant young woman, a pale heated skin and something intense, imploring about her features, she wore a white silk maternity dress, a layered tunic over an ankle-length skirt, this whiteness seemed to Corky to have drawn all the light of the room, a cavernous room lit by candles, and around t
he woman’s neck was a single strand of pearls, her hair was smooth-brushed and tied at the nape of her neck with a white silk bow through which a single white rose had been threaded, Corky stared, Corky stared rudely, a classy broad he assessed her, old Union City society, Shit on their shoes, kid! with what dignity the young woman carried herself amid the crowd, the center of gravity of her body securely in that belly, Corky drew in a sharp breath seeing her half-consciously stroke that belly, he felt that touch in his groin, saw a fleeting wince in the woman’s face as if the baby had kicked her, Corky drew closer, a little drunk and happy and willing to be pushy, take me at my price Corky Corcoran tells Union City, I know who I am and I’m no fucking hypocrite is his boast, he’s a vain cocky son of a bitch with a few drinks in him maneuvering his way around in front of the young woman in the dazzling white costume, catches her eye, smiles, is about to introduce himself when she regards him calmly, coolly, a just perceptible half-smile, then turns aside, passes by, joins a group of people one of whom is her husband, and Corky Corcoran stares after her, his face reddening, quickly he lifts his glass to his mouth and drinks, Bitch! stuck-up cunt! Nobody snubs Corky Corcoran.