What I Lived For

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What I Lived For Page 22

by Joyce Carol Oates


  7

  Corky Commits a Felony

  Thalia, honey?—it’s me, Corky.”

  No answer. All he hears, pressing his ear against the door, is the accelerated pulse of his own blood.

  “Honey, are you there? It’s Corky. Hey, Thalia—” Rapping his knuckles another time on the door, trying the handle another time. As if, asshole, the door’s unlocked itself, just now?

  Corky draws a deep breath. What to do?—well, he’d been expecting this, hadn’t he.

  Behind his eyelids, a glimmer of something naked, fleshy, open-mouthed, open-eyed. Yes but Thalia wouldn’t, not without saying goodbye, she’s an emotional girl and you could say self-destructive but not despairing, you have to be dead-ended to kill yourself. Corky can’t believe, he’d vow to God he knows.

  Knocks on the door a few more times, leans his head to it, no sound inside. Which doesn’t prove she’s not there, or there. She might be out, she’ll be back soon. She might be moved out. Or inside listening calmly to him, he pictures her on a kitchen chair her long legs drawn up to her chest, she’s barefoot, still, very calm, her face composed. Listening to him.

  “Hey, Thalia? It’s Corky.” A pause. He’s scared, sweating.

  The last time they’d spoken together, over the phone. Corky’d called her. At Charlotte’s suggestion. Try to talk sense to her, she won’t listen to me, you know she hates me. Corky’d protested, No, not really, Charlotte, it isn’t that simple. Charlotte said, choked with rage, Yes but I wish it was.

  That last time, Thalia told him please to let her alone, thank you for your solicitude Corky but you’re not my father, Corky fuck off, do you get it?—you don’t love me and I sure as hell don’t love you.

  True that, in Corky’s daydream of a wife, a family, himself as Corky Corcoran yet not exactly himself, and who the guy is, he doesn’t know, there’s no room for Thalia.

  Corky tries the doorknob again. Just don’t lose it, he tells himself. If you lose it, you’re fucked.

  Elsewhere in the building, downstairs, there’s a sound of voices, TV noise. Kids screaming. A young family, Thalia’s fellow tenants at 8397 Highland, half-timbered semidetached old house from the prosperous 1920s when the University was private, much smaller, no more than five thousand students, and Highland was a street of solidly middle-and upper-middle-class houses, upscale apartment buildings, doctors’ offices. Now the University is SUNY Union City, sixteen thousand students, overbuilt in the 1960s boom and retrenching now, for years. Highland is part of a typical university fringe area, some streets more residential than others, boasting to be “safer”—the usual bullshit of city people kidding themselves. Corky’s sold off his near-north side property, won’t invest in any more for a long time. Rising crime rates, declining property values. A high-risk mortgage zone. Rent to students and other transients, you’re going to get fucked.

  Why Thalia, granddaughter of one of the richest men in Union City, real estate wizard, chooses to live here, on a street of shabby-genteel houses, in an area of all-night laundromats, secondhand bookstores and pizzerias and bars and Burger King and video rentals and photocopy services and the Birthright Clinic (abortions) and the Art Forum (a crummy old theater with a marquee advertising a “One-Week-Only Godard Festival”), Corky can’t guess. When he made a stab at it, what he got back over the phone, You don’t love me and I sure as hell don’t love you, was not encouraging.

  Corky descends a step or two, pauses, cocks his head again to listen. He’d tell himself he heard a voice, a muffled cry, but it’s kids screaming downstairs.

  Still, he goes back, knocks on the door again, tries the buzzer which doesn’t seem to work. “Thalia, sweetie?—hey. C’mon.” His buoyant voice, a faint Irish lilt to it at such times, of stress and phony optimism.

  Thinking of, Jesus he’s got to get this out of his head, those glossies in The Hot Spot. A murdered girl, no beauty in such nakedness. The human body, once dead, its luminosity gone, a match flame blown out and, dear sweet Christ, it’s out.

  Dead meat. Used Kleenex, toilet paper.

  Shit, Corky’s kidding himself about that, too. Christina. Loves her, sure he does, maybe he didn’t exactly understand, maybe it isn’t true exactly about Kavanaugh. Hotheaded and he’d lost it fucking her hammering her against the bare floorboards wishing he could tear her cunt, her uterus, all of it, his cock hurtful as a knife.

  Corky gives up and starts back downstairs shielding his eyes from a bare 100-watt lightbulb. There’s a smell of fried potatoes and something garlicky wafting up from downstairs. Maybe Thalia’s friendly with her neighbors?—Corky peers at the name in the slot by the door, it means nothing to him: Esdras. He checks the mailboxes, aluminum with sunburst slots through which you can see mail inside. There’s something in the box marked Thalia Corcoran—envelopes, fliers. Maybe more than a single day’s accumulation. Corky pries the mailbox almost open with his thumb, then releases it. Better not.

  Kids’ tricycles in the vestibule, a baby stroller, an adult bicycle, handsome, expensive-looking. Thalia’s? Strange, the two of them are so out of touch now, he doesn’t know. (Doesn’t know if she still has her car, the Saab. There’s no car on the street that resembles it.) The bicycle’s chain-locked and it’s one of that new hybrid kind, with deep-grooved tires. A dozen speeds, complicated hand brakes, handlebars set at a moderate height, not so low as a racer’s. A man’s bike, but Thalia always wanted men’s bikes. The frames are sturdier, you go faster. Superior design.

  The last time Corky’d bought a bike for Thalia she was in high school. They drove out to that enormous Sports World at the Niagara Mall and Corky was a little dazzled by so much gleaming merchandise. America is play, expensive play. High-tech for kids. Thalia chose a top model, nothing but the best for Corky’s little girl, but he’d winced seeing the price tag—$320 for a kid’s bike? “Gosh, Corky, welcome to the twentieth century!” Thalia teased, nudging him in the ribs with a sidelong smirk at the salesman, a kid not much older than herself. Corky shrugged and laughed, what the hell he could afford it. Though unable to resist telling Thalia on the way home about his bikes when he was a kid, how much they cost, secondhand Schwinns or no-name and no-color bikes gritty with rust. One with a wide wire basket for delivering groceries. One he stole, removing the fenders and painting it a robin’s-egg blue including the rusted handlebars.

  Thalia said, “Oh!—how could you steal?—from another boy?” as if Corky’d committed murder. Corky shrugged, “Plenty of things got stolen from me.” He wasn’t joking.

  Corky returns now to his car, parked at the curb. Should he call the police? They’d come, for him. Break down Thalia’s door. Except then the door would be broken down. The episode would be on the police blotter. Any intervention by law enforcement officers. Any use of force. The name Corcoran would be involved. Maybe Drummond.

  Corky telephones his home number from his car phone, enters a series of code numbers and gets access to his voice mail. Fast-forwards through a half dozen recorded messages and not one of them is Thalia. (And not one of them is Christina.)

  But one is Charlotte, giving him Thalia’s telephone number and the Highland address, a pause then she says she hopes to God it isn’t more trouble and will he please call her back as soon as he can?

  Charlotte who once confided in Corky, even as they were estranged, A mother’s worst fear isn’t just that she will lose her child, but she’ll lose herself, as a mother. She’ll wish she’d never given birth.

  Charlotte, now remarried. Her third husband and Corky hopes to hell this one works out permanently.

  Well—maybe he’d hurt her, and maybe he’d hurt Thalia, but not deliberately. Never deliberately. He’s a man who loves women and never hurts a woman deliberately.

  Corky hangs up the receiver. Starts the car. An idea has come to him, he’ll need to move the car. Up the block. Around the corner. Away from 8397 Highland.

  Excited and nervous like, as a kid, and not exclusively as a kid, he�
�d know he was going to jack himself off only not just yet. Soon.

  Corky’s thinking how, when Thalia worked at Family Services, one of her clients was a welfare mother with a twenty-nine-year-old unemployed son who hung out at her apartment, coerced drug money from her, beat her and terrorized her, and Thalia helped the woman to get a court injunction against him, and soon he began stalking Thalia, she knew it must be him, not speaking to her nor coming too close, just waiting for her, following her, with an improbably fair, rosy round face, and corn-silk hair, a fattish guy, obviously deranged, dangerous. And after weeks of this—the fucker waited for Thalia across from City Hall when she left work, strolling in her parking garage, or in the foyer of the apartment building she lived in at the time (downtown, overlooking the Dominion Bridge and the river) and several times in the very corridor outside her apartment—Thalia called Corky, not desperate in her tone or words, careful in her choice of words, with a forced logic. She had a problem, she said, and she knew the police couldn’t help until the stalker actually did something to her and in the meantime, she guessed, she didn’t know what to do: how, in her thoughts, to ever be free of the man, awake or asleep. Corky, who’d known nothing of this, but who’d never much liked the idea of Thalia as a social welfare worker, said without hesitation, blunt and furious, “O.K., Thalia, leave it to me.”

  Corky’d deliberated approaching the stalker himself. Stalking the stalker—he liked that idea. The Luger in his pocket. Then decided no, better not, you’re a respectable citizen worth two million bucks, and this fucker’s shit on your shoes, blow him away and the D.A. won’t have any choice but to indict, friend of the Slatterys, loyal Democrat, protecting your daughter, no matter, first-degree manslaughter at the least, and carrying a concealed weapon, fuck that. So Corky hired two hefty guys he knew who worked down at the docks, paid them $500 each up front and $500 each when they delivered, and was an eyewitness, from his car, to the fact that they did deliver: dragged Thalia’s stalker into an alley explaining as they punched, kicked, kneed, banged him like a cymbal against the garbage cans, that they were U.C. plainclothes cops assigned to protect City Hall staff and if they had to deal with him a second time he’d be dead meat. And following that, the stalking stopped.

  Of course, Thalia never knew. And Corky wants it that way.

  She knew only that, overnight, the man who’d been terrorizing her disappeared. One day there, the next day not. And the next day, and the next. So she was free in her thoughts of him; of the self-absorption, as she called it, of paranoia.

  Did you have anything to do with it, Corky? she’d asked, but Corky pretended surprise, no he hadn’t done anything yet, you mean the bastard’s stopped following you?

  Expediting Thalia’s stalker. Sweet.

  Thinking of that now, and liking the memory. Maybe he’d been a little reckless, hiring guys like that you’re setting yourself up for blackmail, but, for Thalia, it was worth it.

  Shrewd Corky Corcoran has parked the big Caddy around the corner from Highland, on a side street called Richmond. (Noting that the alley that runs behind Thalia’s house intersects close by.) He unlocks the car trunk, locates an eight-inch screwdriver amid the tools and other crap and slips it inside his coat. Whistling quietly to himself, getting his adrenaline high. Like stepping into the ring in the gym at St. Thomas, his twelve-ounce boxing gloves on, his body, cock to brain, afire.

  Who’s your man?—I’m your man.

  Returns to 8397 Highland. A casual stroller. The neighborhood’s moderately busy. Cars, kids on bikes. Activity enough so no one’s likely to notice him and if so, so what?—Corky Corcoran’s a prosperous businessman and looks it.

  Decently maintained semidetached brick-and-stucco houses, and older Victorian woodframes, fire hazards but attractive, three storeys, turrets, gables, verandas, what remains of old rotting cornices, the kind of architecture Corky as a kid associated with elegance and mystery—the prominent citizens of Irish Hill built such homes for themselves on Dundonald Street. These houses, though, have long been partitioned into rental units. Some of them are rooming houses, run-down, sad to contemplate. A few years from dereliction.

  Shit, thinks Corky, as if personally affronted, once the big old Victorians are gone from America, they’re gone.

  Once his America’s gone, it’s gone.

  Like Irish Hill: virtually no Irish still living there, and even the hills look flatter.

  At Thalia’s house, Corky makes his way unobtrusively, he thinks, along the driveway, badly cracked asphalt, to the rear, an old garage and a car parked just outside it but the car’s one of those cheapie American compacts, not Thalia’s car. (If Thalia still has a car? Old man Drummond who knew to interfere but rarely in his granddaughter’s life insisted that, if she drove any car at all, it had to be a safe car—by which he meant a Volvo, a Mercedes, a Saab. Solid as a tank so if another driver hits her even side-on the steel won’t buckle. These Jap cars, said Drummond contemptuously—steel soft as cooked spaghetti.)

  Corky sees the back yard’s surprisingly deep, a rotted fence at the rear, but there’s access to the alley. Just in case.

  Children’s swings, garbage cans lined up against the garage. Dusk now, could be November. Wind-blown drizzle, a metallic taste. A back porch, needs repair. Window looking into a kitchen: a man’s big burly figure, young guy, but nearly bald, with rimless glasses, a junior-faculty look to his harried face as he stoops to tend to a fretting child. Corky thinks maybe you don’t always want kids, eh?—not when they’re screaming like that.

  Keeping well out of the light so the guy, Esdras, can’t see him. Anyway he’s feeling, in his adrenaline glow, invisible to human eyes.

  (But it’s reassuring: that Thalia lives upstairs from a young seeming-normal family. And that the kids’ clamor is sufficiently loud, Corky won’t be heard.)

  Returns to the front of the house, and again enters the vestibule crowded with bikes, baby stroller, into the pungent aroma of cooking, and climbs the stairs, as quietly! silently! as possible; and, at Thalia’s door, jimmies open the lock with the screwdriver; working fast, and sweating; desperate, maybe a mistake, but what the fuck else can he do?

  Don’t believe it’s suicide, it isn’t.

  You don’t love me and I sure as hell don’t love you.

  A good sign, thank God the chain latch isn’t in place. If it was, Corky’d have to fracture the doorframe or break in the paneling.

  Corky pushes the door open, pauses before entering. Unconsciously holding his breath.

  It’s true, as the cops say. You can smell death immediately, as soon as you enter death’s premises. It’s in the air. It’s a high meaty unmistakable smell. Panic, too. You smell panic, too. Not just when the body’s been dead for hours or days and it’s decomposing flesh but a body freshly killed.

  And sometimes too a stench of excrement, yes Corky remembers. Corky never forgets. The final ignominy of a violent death. The final thing God does for you before letting you go.

  “Thalia.”

  An emptiness, and no smell thank God except the cooking odors from downstairs.

  Corky shuts the door behind him. Relocks the Yale lock, and slips the chain latch in place. His hands are trembling badly.

  Switches on a light and sees—a surprise—that Thalia’s living room isn’t what he’d expected, it’s so spare, sparsely furnished. Unlike previous places she’s lived, and her room, her girlhood room, at home.

  There are only a few items of furniture—a small sofa covered in a gritty fabric like whole wheat, some plain varnished hardback chairs, a long, low, unfinished table stacked with books and papers. The hardwood floor has only a single handwoven dove-gray carpet, Navajo-looking. This, Corky remembers from the other apartment. Artsy-craftsy stuff. Attractive, if you go for that look.

  Corky’s critical noting sloppy carpentry at the room’s wainscoting. And those oyster-white painted walls with a look of aged, fine-cracked plaster beneath. Renovating these old houses, y
ou either do it right or don’t do it at all.

  The room is narrow, windows at either end. Old-fashioned many-paned windows, the kind that collect grime fast and can’t be kept clean, outside or in. Corky’d take out those windows and replace them with clear Thermopane. Thalia hasn’t hung any curtains or drapes to soften the effect of the windows, that stark, raw look Corky finds ugly. There are cartons against the walls, maybe she hasn’t moved in yet. Maybe she’s preparing to move out.

  Corky’s in motion, quick, nerved up, walking as lightly as he can in these smooth-soled shoes. If she is here, she’d be in the bedroom or the bathroom, so he checks these rooms out, his heart beating so hard he’s virtually blinded for a few seconds switching on lights, staring. But nothing. No. No Thalia in the bathroom, her naked body not sprawled bloody in the tub or on the floor, nor is she in the bedroom, her naked body atop the bed in a posture of mock sleep; nor, Corky stoops to look, blood rushing into his head, is she under the bed. He rises panting and elated.

 

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