You Can't Catch Me

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Tristram’s hungry gaze took in the young woman’s elegantly black-clad figure; dropped to her slender ankles, lifted slowly to her hips, her waist, her breasts.… With a pang of desire he recalled Zoe’s wild embrace; her arms coiling around his neck; he could feel again the urgency of her warm panting breath. He knew that beneath the artful camouflage of her clothes Fleur Grunwald was astonishingly beautiful; as beautiful as any of the fleshy images on Otto Grunwald’s secret walls; and that her beauty was not marred by the tapestry of wildly colored tattoos that covered it, but enhanced. And it seemed to provoke Tristram’s desire the more, that he knew, and had seen; and that Fleur (if Zoe spoke the truth) knew nothing of his knowledge.

  As if reading Tristram’s thoughts, Fleur backed from him, her expression now confused, the spasmodic smile twitching at her lips. In a nearly inaudible voice she said, “I—I am not worthy. I think that you—if you—if things were—I think, Angus,” she said, her voice lifting bravely, “—I think you would find me despoiled.”

  “Find you—?”

  “Despoiled.”

  Fleur turned abruptly away, and hid her face in her hands. A shaft of pale sunshine, filtered through the gauzy inner curtain of the tall window, illuminated, as if in a rare work of art, the gold-glinting highlights of her hair, and the drops of moisture, like iridescent pearls, that fell from her eyes.

  Tristram could bear it no longer. He went to embrace her, and pressed his lips against her mouth; and Fleur gave a little scream, high-pitched and piercing as a child’s; and seemed almost to leap out of his arms. “No!” she cried. “Oh please!”

  “Fleur, for God’s sake!” Tristram said, rather more harshly than he wished.

  His instinct was to seize the woman’s wrist, to calm her; but she backed cowering away from him, arms lifted in feeble self-protection, and her widened eyes showing white around the iris. Tristram froze where he stood, staring at her.

  Fleur said quickly, “I’m so sorry! Dear Angus! I—I can’t seem to help myself—it must have something to do with him. Please believe me when I say that I love you; I love no one but you; I am eternally in your debt, for reasons of which we cannot speak. I want to marry you, I will marry you, but—”

  “But you imagine yourself ‘despoiled’!” Tristram said.

  “—And so much has happened in so short a space of time,” Fleur pleaded, “—surely you can sympathize with me? I had to flee Otto so quickly, and all the while I hid at Delancy Street I knew the madman would do virtually anything to get me back, and revenge himself upon me.” She stared at Tristram with tear-filled eyes, biting her lower lip like a repentant child. “But please believe me—I do love you.”

  Tristram drew his forearm roughly across his face, muttering to himself, so that Fleur could not quite hear, “Of course! Of course!”

  “You do—believe me?”

  “Of course!”

  And he cast the frightened woman so savage a look, she stared at him for a long uncomprehending moment … and then sank sideways in a dead faint, utterly silent, as if her spirit had been extinguished within her.

  And minutes later, Zoe emerged.

  “She sleeps. So that I may speak.”

  “Zoe—?”

  Fleur’s gleaming hair lay loosed in a spill over the arm of the couch, where Tristram had carried her; a pulse beat at her left temple, and in the shallow indentation at the base of her throat, where Tristram had unbuttoned her high, tight collar. His anger had drained from him at once; he was suffused with so powerful a sense of shame, he might have been a child again, scolded for some small infraction of his father’s household rules.

  “‘Woman is to be adored,’—she cannot forget.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Zoe means what Zoe says. Zoe can speak only the truth.”

  “But Fleur—”

  “I am Zoe.”

  “—my poor darling—”

  “Zoe is not ‘poor,’ Zoe is free,” she whispered. “It is she who is ‘poor,’ while imagining herself free.”

  “But now the monster is dead.”

  “She knows how; but does not know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She will love you—in her way.”

  “‘In her way’—?”

  “The way of—false honor.”

  “‘False honor’—?”

  “The way of weakness, of subterfuge, of acid-chastity, of pretty deceit!”

  The words issued hissing, and quite surprised Tristram with their vehemence.

  He was kneeling close beside Fleur, or Zoe, as she lay in a posture of helplessness on the couch; one of his arms cradling her head, and his face so close to hers that his breath, pantingly exhaled, stirred the wisps and tendrils of hair at her temples. He felt as if he were dangerously close to fainting, himself; or to bursting; both contrite, and enormously excited, as he had not been since his first encounter with Zoe on Delancy Street. It seemed to him that he and this woman—this woman, and not the other—had had a secret understanding between them all along, to the exclusion of the rest of the world.

  “I have put her to sleep—so that we may be alone. It has been so long.”

  “My darling Fleur—”

  “I am Zoe. Your Zoe.”

  “My Zoe.”

  Tristram kissed her; kissed her parted lips, and parted them further; felt the woman’s hot, darting, astonishing tongue; and feared he would not be able to contain himself. But she slapped lightly at him, and drew back, framing his face with her hands; saying in an admonishing tone, “But we have much to talk of, you and me! ‘Angus’ and ‘Zoe.’”

  Stupidly Tristram said, “I am ‘Angus.’”

  “And I am ‘Zoe.’”

  “—She knows nothing of you?”

  “And nothing, or very little, of you.”

  “She suspects nothing?”

  Zoe laughed loudly, letting her head fall back against the arm of the couch; so that Tristram saw yet more forcibly the tiny pulse beating in her throat, which he wanted very badly to kiss. “—She suspects everything,” Zoe said. “When it suits her.”

  “But you—she—claims to love me.”

  “Ah she does, she does! She ‘claims.’”

  “And to want to marry me.”

  “To ‘want.’”

  As if her fingers moved of their own accord Zoe was slowly, languidly, teasingly unbuttoning the remaining buttons of her blouse; revealing by degrees, to Tristram’s yearning gaze, a portion of the infamous tattooing—the miniature eyes, iridescent-blue, -green, -purple, -black, of the peacock’s tail; and the serrated red-glisten of what appeared to be an Oriental dragon’s tongue, which Tristram had not remembered. He would have buried his face in her breasts had she not seized his head again, gripping it with both hands in mock-maternal admonishment. “This is not the time!” she said. “The time is rapidly approaching for love, but—this is not the time.”

  Tristram said, in anguish, “When I adore you so? When I have proven—?”

  In her singsong Zoe crooned: “This, here, is a bed not a bed, in a room not a room, with so many looking on: this cannot be.”

  Tristram did not understand, and felt desire very like despair. “But she will marry me,—you will marry me—won’t you?”

  “One day! One hour! When the monster is finally buried! Soon!”

  “But—when? I am dying to love you, Fleur—I mean Zoe—”

  “Do not confuse us, or we will exact our revenge!”

  “But I love you both—”

  “Impossible!”

  “He did not love you both?”

  “He! Him! Surely not!” Zoe’s nostrils widened in contempt. “He did not know either of us—which necessitated his doom.”

  “But how, Zoe, did he die? I had thought I’d killed him in the park, but—”

  Zoe shut her eyes tight, smiling, rocking slowly from side to side. “She sleeps, and Zoe wakes; Zoe sleeps, and she wakes; but both may sleep at once; t
hat others may wake.”

  “—I had thought I’d killed him in the park, in the tunnel, but it was the wrong man, it seems to have been an innocent man,” Tristram said, “—while at the same time—it must have been nearly the same time—your husband did die, was stabbed to death, at home. But I did not do it, I would swear I did not do it—”

  “Swear, swear: ‘If done, for love; for love only.’”

  “For love, yes—”

  “For her love, or mine?”

  This question Tristram could not answer. In despair he said, “Tell me, Zoe, if you can—”

  “Zoe speaks only the truth!”

  “—if you know—”

  “Zoe speaks only the truth, that she may speak none!”

  “—why does Fleur shrink from me, from even my touch? Why, when she claims to love me?”

  “‘She’—! Why love ‘she’!”

  “But I can’t live without her! I have given over my life to her, as you must know—”

  “As others have done, to their doom!”

  “But why does she shrink from me? And yet look upon me so tenderly, and insist that she loves me? And that—”

  “She fears your masculine repugnance, seeing the creature as she is, and not as she wishes to appear,” Zoe said, suddenly impassioned, “—so horribly, in her eyes, so irrevocably, exposed.” She had opened the pleated silk blouse so that her small softly-plump breasts were revealed, each cupped from beneath by richly colored hieroglyphic figures stitched into the flesh, surrounding even the taut nipples; a sight, a vision, even more mesmerizing than Tristram recalled. Writ in a language that has long gone by. And none can read the text, not even I. Zoe continued to speak, in her taunting singsong; but Tristram no longer heard. Had he felt some revulsion for Grunwald’s work, earlier? Had his flesh subtly crawled, exposed to the mutilated female body? Ah, how differently he felt now! “Beautiful,” he whispered, staring. “No one so beautiful.” He would have torn Zoe’s clothes from her but she caught him up short, gripping his hair. He said, in a choked voice, “I want to save you!”

  “You have saved me—at the cost of your own skin.”

  She then drew his head to her; cradled him hard and snug in her arms; and, for he knew not how long, Tristram lost himself in very bliss, in the madness of bliss … kissing, and tonguing, and sucking … grinding his face against the woman’s perfumy body. Did he imagine it, or was he able to taste the slightly acetous dye of the “charm” …?

  4

  And so Fleur Grunwald eluded him: and he never saw her again.

  Or, if he saw her, it was at such a distance, and he was in so despairing a state, he could not have sworn it was her.

  Repeatedly he telephoned the Delancy Street number, and repeatedly he was told she was not there; would not be there; had moved out; had moved away; and if he did not cease these calls the police would be notified, and—But at this point Tristram would have slammed down the receiver. “Someone is lying,” he said aloud, his heart beating angrily, “—but surely it would not be her.”

  Surely not? Not Fleur? Who had promised to marry him? Who had insisted she loved him? Who had sworn “eternal gratitude” to him? It was impossible to believe, thus Tristram did not believe it.

  “She is newly widowed, and must be cautious,” he concluded. “She is biding her time and I must bide my time too.”

  Though he did not much like the pronounced silvery streaks in his hair, shading, at the crown of his head, virtually into white: When had this occurred? And why?—And when he neglected to shave twice daily (as, of late, out of forgetfulness, was sometimes the case) his stubbled beard glinted a queer metallic white; giving Tristram, for all his attractiveness, and the cut of his clothes, a look as of one of the city’s homeless wanderers: dishevelled, vagrant, slightly mad, and perhaps (if only slightly) dangerous.

  And days passed. And days.

  Though it was ludicrously expensive, and the hotel staff was just perceptibly less attentive than formerly, Tristram retained his suite in the Hotel Moreau. For Fleur had no other address or telephone number for the man she knew as “Angus Markham,” should she wish to contact him.

  Otto Grunwald’s funeral was held in stately Episcopal splendor, attended by hundreds of mourners (as the newspapers repectfully noted): but Tristram Heade was not among them. Wisely, he kept his distance though a strong, very nearly sexual desire urged him to go … so that he might catch a glimpse of dear Fleur and perhaps even exchange a few words with her. “And also I might gloat a bit over the fact of the corpse,” Tristram said thoughtfully, “—the monster now safely dead. For there is pleasure in justice, after all.” But in the end of course he did not go to Grunwald’s funeral.

  Markham might have whispered in his ear that plain-clothes detectives would attend the funeral, observing mourners closely. There would be secret photos taken, video films made. And Grunwald’s nephew, Hans, had glimpsed Tristram’s face that evening.…

  So Tristram stayed away from the Grunwalds. Bided his time. Began to make small bets on horse races at the off-track betting—at first impulsively, then more methodically. (To his surprise and delight, he won most of his bets.) He read all he could discover of Otto Grunwald’s unsolved murder and watched local television news avidly. Shocking, tragic … vicious crime … well-known, much-admired Philadelphia philanthropist … unknown assailant sought. Philadelphia police were particularly baffled by the fact that, on the night of the break-in, the burglar alarm system in Grunwald’s mansion would seem to have been turned off.

  “That,” thought Tristram Heade, with a small, perplexed smile, “is strange.”

  But what of his crimes? Tristram objected. So many columns of newsprint, so much valuable television time, given over to eulogistic fantasies of Otto Grunwald’s philanthropy: and not a word, not so much as a hint, of the brute’s perverse lusts … of the innermost workings of his soul. Tristram was seriously tempted to send the Philadelphia Inquirer a document listing Grunwald’s crimes against Fleur, and against his previous wives; and, by extension, against all humanity. “Of course I would pay to have it typed,” he shrewdly reasoned. “I would not write it in my own hand.”

  And the days passed.

  And the fact of Poins’s death dropped out of sight, seemingly forever; as if, in contrast to Grunwald’s, it were of no worth. For this murder Tristram felt, at times, the nudging of conscience … and wondered if he should turn himself in … with an explanation of what he had done, and why; and how he was, in the deepest sense, innocent … though also guilty.

  He decided not to act, however, until he next spoke with Fleur; for his responsibility, as lover and husband-to-be, was with her; and not elsewhere. It tore his heart to think that, if he were arrested for the death of a homeless vagrant, a man he had not, ah, he had not! meant to kill, his and Fleur’s happiness would be forever ruined.

  “Still, I am damned sorry for what I did,” he told himself a dozen times a day, “—and really do wish, if it were possible, the harmless old crank might live again.”

  And one morning (it seemed by this time to be deeply spring, judging by the warmth, the fragrance of the air, the tulip-bordered green of Rittenhouse Square) two very mysterious things occurred.

  First, Tristram read in the Inquirer the astonishing news that Philadelphia police had finally made an arrest in the Grunwald case; and that their suspect, a thirty-five-year-old black man, previously convicted of burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, violation of parole, etc., answered to descriptions of “suspicious loiterers” in the Burlingham Boulevard area; had no alibi for the night of Grunwald’s death; and was known to have owned a hat very like, or identical with, the hat found on the ground beneath the forced window … a hat so idiosyncratic in style, police withheld all mention of it publicly, confident that, in time, as they proceeded with their investigation, it would be traced back to the killer. And so it was: or so it seemed.

  The hat in the photograph was not Tristram’s hat.


  It was not a beret at all, but a cap, plaid, of the kind that British workingmen are commonly portrayed as wearing; its band covered with ornamentation of some kind, buttons, or decals; the hat “long associated” with Rufus S. Smith, the suspect, whose South Philadelphia neighbors identified it. And forensic experts were certain that … and Smith could not account for his whereabouts … and the pattern of his previous convictions suggested.… “But it is not my hat,” Tristram exclaimed, clutching at his head. “They are arresting the wrong man.”

  He was sitting on the edge of his much-rumpled bed, smoking the remains of an ill-smelling cigar, unshowered, unshaven, clad only in silk underwear—the crotch uncomfortably tight, and the floral-patterned fabric painful to the eye: but Tristram’s own more modest underwear had long since been used up, and he had procrastinated sending out his laundry—and he continued to sit there for a very long time, reading, and rereading, and again rereading the utterly puzzling article in the Inquirer. Had he known nothing of the circumstances of Grunwald’s death he would certainly have thought, as the police did, that they had found their murderer; he would have done no more than glance at the photograph of the “incriminating” cap; he would have forgotten Rufus S. Smith’s name immediately, and gone on to other news items. As it was, he sat befuddled; slack-jawed; rather sick at heart. Poor Rufus S. Smith! And poor Dr. Poins! It seemed to him a vicious thing, that Fleur’s and his future happiness should depend upon the tragedies of, thus far, two utterly innocent victims.…

  “And perhaps there will be more,” he murmured, tapping thick gray cigar ash into the remains of a glass of scotch.

  But the second development of that morning was even more astounding.

  Midway in his breakfast (which continued to be fairly lavish, despite the malaise of recent days), Tristram was interrupted by a knock at the door; went to answer it with a sense of apprehension; and was handed a plain-wrapped package by the captain of the bellboys, who said it had been left downstairs at the desk, ANGUS MARKHAM and SPECIAL HANDLING REQUESTED were inked on it in neat block letters. Though sensing that he would have been happier had he not opened the door, Tristram tipped the man generously, and sent him away.