What I Lived For

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What I Lived For Page 56

by Joyce Carol Oates


  Hey: d’you love me?

  Oh, lover. Oh God.

  He’s waking. He’ll be O.K. Nobody’s in the room and nobody’s at the door which is chain-latched as well as locked. That rumbling rackety sound—must be I-190, or the wind.

  Last night, a pint of Jack Daniel’s by moonlight. Parked in his car in a secret place in a tunnel of tall trees to the very horizon. The moon’s craters winked. The light became too bright—blinding.

  You don’t want her to see you’re here, mister? Do you?

  Sweet Christ, no. Have mercy.

  Corky’s waking. Through the gash in what appears to be a wall (in fact it’s a strip of window jaggedly bared where draw-drapes on their jerrybuilt runner don’t quite close) he sees suddenly, at an upward angle where the sky should be, the uniform corrugated gray of cement that hasn’t set right. That ripply-hard surface that burns your ass: you pay the fucking contractor to do a professional job, he fucks up and there’s a hassle over the estimate.

  But, no: that is the sky. Paved over.

  Something special about today, fuck it the sky should be blue.

  Something special Corky’s supposed to do today: what?

  Follow through on his deals. Don’t bullshit. Name your price, refuse to go any higher and refuse to accept any lower. Anybody’s dealing with Corcoran, Inc., he’s dealing with a real pro.

  A sudden memory: riding high in the jolting cab of the cement-mixer truck heavy as a tank. Tim Corcoran behind the wheel grinning down at him. That grinding deafening noise, rotary motion of the wet cement in the rear of the truck. Say the mixer breaks down or even slows there’s the danger the cement will harden and the truck will be thrown off balance and overturn but Don’t be afraid, Jerome, Daddy won’t let that happen.

  A nice memory. Corky’s smiling in his sleep. Tears stinging the corners of his eyes but he’s smiling, he’s happy. Daddy? Daddy don’t go. Wait.

  Here’s a nice memory, too: even before Homo sapiens over two hundred thousand years ago there was a species of apeman who buried their dead with ceremony. Not just dragging off the putrid corpses, or dumping them. Or eating them. But taking the time to dig real graves and laying the dead inside and arranging little treasures like flint arrowheads around their bodies, choice haunches of meat, mysterious stones—trinkets. And flat, heavy stones placed at the heads of the graves to protect the dead from scavengers, evil spirits. To commemorate the dead. Corky read this in a paperback titled Mysteries of Human Evolution: From Where, to Where?

  Maybe they weren’t Homo sapiens but, fuck it, the apemen cared.

  Corky’s sobbing, Corky’s in mortal terror nobody’s going to care.

  Sobbing dry-eyed and without sound like the dry heaves and this at last wakes him up: he sits up with a jolt, he’s been lying sideways in his sour-smelling underwear across a motel bed, dim as an undersea cave in here except for the gash at the window, at first he doesn’t know where the fuck he is except he’s not in his own bed, then he remembers, or starts to. By his watch it’s 7:19 A.M. Thank God, early. He’ll need every hour of this day, he knows. Out on the expressway traffic is sporadic—not a continuous roar but thrumps of vibrating sound. Corky shakes his head to get the kinks out of his neck and that’s a mistake—his hangover hits him like lightning. His eyes pop like those plastic eyes in a joke shop. But he’s O.K. He’s going to be O.K.

  To prove it, Corky gets down on the carpet (wincing seeing it’s stained: God damn) and does twenty quick push-ups. Well, almost twenty. On his back then and tries for twenty sit-ups. He’s winded, his head’s reeling. O.K., enough. Tomorrow morning, Tuesday, a weekday, he’ll check himself in at the Alcoholics Anonymous Reception Center in the rear of Union City General Hospital. No “Jerome Andrew Corcoran” if you’re “anonymous.” Right?

  Soon as he enrolls, he’ll tell Christina. How much she knows about his drinking problem he doesn’t know but the woman’s obviously smart enough to know he’s got a problem. He can blame his drinking for the crude way he’s treated her.

  Groping for his near-empty pack of Camels on the bedside table, on his way swaying, head down, into the bathroom he’s already got one lit and while pissing puffs deeply and God-damn gratefully and even while taking a fast clumsy harried shower he leaves the cigarette burning on the top of the toilet tank where, when he feels the need, he can reach it.

  Then, this: at an International House of Pancakes on North Decatur Boulevard just outside the city limits where also, among the mostly families with children, he figures he’d never be sighted by anyone who knows him, Corky surprises himself devouring a gut-stretching breakfast of a half dozen banana pancakes so soaked in blueberry syrup they resemble sponges, scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon and butter-soaked toast, a tall glass of orange juice and several cups of black coffee—no idea he’s so ravenous with hunger until he starts eating, then almost can’t stop. And he’s smoking too, and scanning the Journal. Actually has to open his belt a notch, and the girl who’s been waiting on him, platinum-blond with brown-penciled eyebrows and funky-slutty makeup like Madonna, shakes a forefinger at him with such flirty familiarity Corky’s flattered as hell. He laughs, rubbing his stomach ruefully, saying, “—Must be I’m a guy who can’t say ‘no,’” and the waitress murmurs suggestively, “That must get you in a lot of trouble, mister.” Corky eyes her frankly—pert little jacked-up breasts, cute little ass even in the sappy uniform, fantastic legs—so she’s flattered, too; young, but practiced at this kind of banter with solitary male customers at least like Corky giving a signal, by his clothes if not his bristly jaws, of being a generous tipper, and of not being obviously nuts.

  Only a year or two ago Corky might’ve pursued this a little more, got the girl’s telephone number, assuming she’d give it out to a stranger—surprising how many of them do: he was a girl or woman in such circumstances, he’d never—and see what might come of it. But not any longer. No thanks.

  He’s trying not to think about last night. What the consequences will be. The details of what he and Charlotte actually did are woozy—like a film fast-forwarded, without sound, as soon as Corky gave in and picked up that glass of Red Label. God damn! It’s the Irish weakness, you lose control completely, wind up doing the exact opposite of what you want to do. Fuck fuck fuck Charlotte for getting him to drink, seducing him. Saying she misses him, she loves him—“Oh, Christ.” Is that possible? And what’s he supposed to do about it?

  A new concept of alimony, that’s for sure. Fucking your own ex-wife, like in installments.

  And standing up Vic and Sandra for the second evening in a row. Is he crazy? Is he out of control completely? What’s he going to tell them, this time?

  All like a dream once he started drinking again like it happened, not I did it. Still less I’m responsible.

  After leaving Charlotte, Corky’s intentions were certainly to return home. Yet somehow he’d ended up, at midnight, drinking from a pint of Jack Daniel’s bought in a Chateauguay Falls liquor store, in his car parked secretly in the street outside the Kavanaughs’ house. He can’t remember making any decision to drive into the village—Christina and Harry live in the “historic” village of Chateauguay Falls, a few miles from the recently developed suburban subdivision of Quail Ridge Hollow—but he remembers shutting off his ignition, switching off his lights. He remembers sipping from the pint and staring at the facade of the big white brick colonial with the dark shutters—dark green, dark blue, black?—stark as a photograph in black and white in the glaring moonlight. Once, a single time only, he’d been a guest in that house: a large New Year’s Day reception. Christina Kavanaugh shaking his hand, lightly kissing his cheek—Corky Corcoran, one of eighty or ninety people. Harry Kavanaugh, the retired federal judge, in his motorized wheelchair, gaunt-cheeked, graying, a ruin of a handsome man, his eyes still sharp, bright, inquisitive, reaching out to shake Corky’s hand briskly. They weren’t friends, scarcely knew each other, but wished each other Happy New Year vigorously.


  Last night, at midnight, most of the house was darkened. A single lighted room on the second floor. Christina, awake and alone thinking of him. He knew.

  Then, this: except, did it happen?—or did Corky dream it?

  The moon wavered like a swaying head, the sparely spaced streetlamps blurred, Corky was blinking astonished as the moon grew brighter and brighter and blinding and suddenly—“What’s your business here, mister?”—a private security cop shining his flashlight in Corky’s eye cautious and even courteous as no real cop, still less no Union City cop, would be, and Corky stammered, “Th-there’s a woman in there, in that house . . . I don’t know, officer, I’m just here,” his face hot and his voice wan, shamed, resigned, none of his old belligerence, nor even his pride. The cop examined Corky’s wallet, his ID, not knowing the name “Jerome Andrew Corcoran,” thank God, asked him a few questions which Corky stumblingly answered, this private cop a young guy scarcely thirty who’d obviously never had to use his gun and wanted no trouble that could be avoided or that might, this being the affluent white suburbs, result in a lawsuit; and no doubt he was embarrassed too at the spectacle of a guy Corky’s age sitting out in his car like a lovesick kid. Saying, “You don’t want this woman to know you’re here, do you, mister?”

  No, officer. Thank you, officer.

  So Corky’d driven sheepishly off, God-damn grateful not to be run in to the local police station where he’d’ve had to take, and flunk, a Breathalyzer test, for sure. God-damn grateful it was only a private cop not a Chateauguay Falls cop, a probable arrest.

  Following that, his nerves shot, Corky couldn’t drive all the way home to Summit Avenue. That big empty echoing house. Checked into the Days Inn at one A.M. and now at eight A.M. he’s here reading the Journal in a booth in the smoking section of a tacky International House of Pancakes on North Decatur, gut still straining against his loosened belt. He’s dropping ash on the newspaper’s pages anxious and disappointed there’s little news of interest to him, no new developments in the Plummer case, a brief item on page five that a “small fire of unknown origin” was reported the night before in the African-American First Church of the Evangelist on East Huron—Marcus Steadman’s church—obvious arson, but minimal damage, quickly put out by a caretaker. There’s a notice on the obituary page of Marilee Plummer’s funeral, and the same photograph the Journal has used before. A private funeral, attended by family and friends of the deceased. Last rites at the Covenant Evangelical Free Church, burial in Mount Moriah Cemetery.

  On the Journal’s front page the big feature is Memorial Day—the oldest veteran to be “marching” (in a wheelchair) in this afternoon’s parade sponsored by the Mohawk County American Legion is ninety-six years old, a U.S. Army corporal who’d served in World War I, face like a desiccated turtle’s and skeletal hand raised in a military salute. Eyes so empty-looking they might be blind but he’s a feisty old guy, you got to give these old, ancient men and women credit, hanging on.

  This year’s veterans’ parade will be the first since 1919 to follow a curtailed route, participation in and attendance at the annual parades have been in decline since the early 1980s, so instead of a three-mile march from the World War I Memorial in Union Square, downtown, to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Lake Erie Park, the parade will begin at a smaller park a mile and a half east of Lake Erie Park and continue as usual along that stretch of Union Boulevard. And there will be fewer units in the parade, fewer veterans marching. Asked why this is so, the president of the Mohawk County American Legion, a sixty-two-year-old veteran of the Korean War, is quoted, “The old traditions are dying out, I guess. Younger people today, they get war on television and in the movies and it isn’t real to them, so veterans aren’t real to them.”

  Sad, thinks Corky. Thinking of his father, his war.

  Thinking too, Is anybody real to anybody else?

  Quickly skimming the rest of the news. Governor Cuomo, the New York State Legislature, pollution control laws, the old capital punishment debate—the legislators, reflecting the “will of the people,” vote yes to restore it; Cuomo vetoes the bill. Next governor, if he’s a Republican, will be pro–capital punishment, the electric chair will be reclaimed. There’s an article Corky’d take the time to read if he had the time on the Justice Department auditing the United Way, including the United Way of Union City—if it turns out the local branch is crooked, too, that means Corky Corcoran’s been a sucker, every year he gives $1000 to the United Way courtesy of Corcoran, Inc. It’s only one of the charities and organizations Corcoran, Inc., gives money to, all of them local, most of them headed, like the United Way, by people Corky knows, sure he wants to impress them—who doesn’t want to impress, being “charitable”?—but he’s naturally generous, too. God damn, if he’s been taken by these bastards! One of the local ex-officers is a member of the U.C.A.C. and a guy Corky knows, would’ve said he trusts, here in the Journal it says a county grand jury is convening to consider bringing criminal charges against him for transferring $288,000 from a spin-off United Way organization to his own banking account to pay off a mortgage on his house. Corky whispers aloud, “God damn.”

  The one thing that pisses him, is being a sucker, or even seeming a sucker.

  And more front-page news of this remote country Bosnia—“Serbs” attacking, “Muslim Slav forces” seeking retaliation. “Neo-Nazi” youth culture, vandalism, terrorism in the old East Germany. “Palestinian Kills Rabbi in Gaza—Israelites Retaliate.” “Haitian Capital’s Worst Week of Violence.” There’s a city in Brazil where the population has increased eleven-fold since 1940, there’s “economic and moral despair” in the old Soviet Union, there’s a “renewal of township violence” in South Africa. So much bad news from all around the world would cheer Corky up, you’re an American you’re living in the best God-damned country in the world, except there’s rotten news at home too, he isn’t even going to read about drug killings, shootouts in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, you name it, he isn’t going to read another fucking human-interest feature on AIDS, or the homeless, or battered children. It’s like prodding an aching tooth, to scan the financial section, yes but he can’t resist, it’s like looking at your X rays dreading the fatal shadow in the lungs, dreading headline news of his asshole investments, asshole big dreams, Greenbaum’s ponderous Jew-frog face appears fleetingly before him, there’s a guy who got Corky Corcoran’s number immediately: sucker. Quarterly losses for Delta, United, Chrysler, GM, Dow Chemical—Corky doesn’t own stock in any of these, so feels a stab of satisfaction. And Sears: Jesus, can Sears go under? Sears? Corky winces seeing this outfit he’d owned stock in not long ago, “American Health Laboratories” they call themselves, is pleading guilty to defrauding government health insurance programs making false claims for tests measuring cholesterol and iron, might be indicted for negligence resulting in hundreds of heart patients’ deaths—“The cocksuckers.” On the advice of a broker-friend Corky bought 200 shares of stock in the company at twenty-eight dollars which turned out to be the high, almost at once it started going down and Corky hung on like a dope finally bailing out at nine dollars—remembers those days vividly, around the time Thalia was having trouble with that psychopath stalking her.

  Much of the Journal’s politics, like TV these days. The presidential election’s over five months away but there’s this feverish interest in it, Corky’s in a fever too, or would be if he had time to think about it right now. Damn, that shit with “Gennifer” Flowers really hurt Clinton, makes a fool of him if nothing else—a cunt’s got no power except to throw shame on a man, that’s her power. Corky reads there’s a mood of “skepticism” in the country, there’s a “widespread voters’ revolt” in the offing, polls show that Americans are “fed up” with their politicians. Yet, also in the polls, voters still favor George Bush over Bill Clinton by a big majority. Clinton will win the Democratic presidential nomination but won’t win the election—it’s possible he won’t get many more votes, if as many,
as this weirdo out of nowhere who’s never been elected to any public office in his life, Ross Perot. What a humiliation for the Democrats! Another Republican sweep! The shits could run Reagan again, even Nixon—they’d win. Corky’s sick reading such crap, by November second he’ll really be sick. Here’s George Bush on the front page of the Journal giving a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis in praise of “jobs, family, peace, and the need to maintain the world’s highest standards of military might.” Here’s fucking Quayle on page three saying the same thing at the Air Force Academy in Pueblo, Colorado. The lead editorial—who writes this shit, anyway? Corky knows most of the Journal editors, they seem like reasonable men—is a MEMORIAL DAY SALUTE to all veterans past present and future of all American wars and a special salute to President George Bush for his “decisive, inspiring leadership” in Operation Desert Storm where American military power not only ruled the day but made such a powerful impression on the Soviets, the USSR’s disintegration thus the defeat of world communism was assured by it.

  Corky crumples the paper, lets the pages scatter in the booth. Knows, just knows, in his gut, that Clinton won’t win the election in November, the Blue Jays won’t win the American League championship in October. He’s fucked. He knows.

  Then, this: on his way out of the International House of Pancakes Corky goes to pay his bill seeing the cashier and his waitress whispering, giggling together casting him significant glances, he’s flattered but a little uneasy, what’s up? His waitress doesn’t even know yet the size of the tip he’s left for her, a five-dollar bill under his coffee cup, more than twice what she’s probably expecting, so that isn’t it. Corky pays his bill, takes a toothpick to clean the worst crud out of his teeth, and still these flirty broads are eyeing him so he gives them a quizzical look, and the one who’s the cashier, a plumpish-pretty woman in her mid-thirties, says, “—Oh, mister, we’re just wondering: who are you? We saw you on TV yesterday we think—”

 

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