Double Delight

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Terence could usually count on his wife’s eyes glazing over when he began to speak of Feinemann matters; though Phyllis had once been genuinely interested in Terence’s work, and above all in the intrigues and feuds that occasionally enveloped it, that time was long since past. Now, however, she continued to stare at him. “But you were in Atlanta on January 12, Terry. And it was a Sunday.”

  Terence said quickly, but now he did stammer, “Then the date is wrong, I’m sure I—I know I—It was a Monday, I’m sure. It must have been January 13, and whoever made this out—” He paused, and collected his wits, and said, more calmly, though with a flicker of wonderment at Phyllis, that she should make so much of an utterly inconsequential matter, “—Just an innocent mistake, I suppose, on the part of the waiter. Why is it so important?”

  Phyllis peered at the receipt as if it were somehow to blame. She’d been drinking white wine at dinner, which she rarely did except when they dined out; the color was up in her cheeks, giving her a ruddy, girlish appearance. It was true, she and Terence were on easier terms lately: Terence was absent from home no less than before, but his love for Ava-Rose, and the young woman’s obvious love for him, had restored peace of a kind to his soul; for her part, Phyllis had one or two new, important clients at Queenston Opportunities, occupying a good deal of her time, too, and pleasing her enormously.

  After a moment Phyllis said, with a shrug, and a smile very like Cindy’s, as hurt dissolved to indifference, or even to whimsy, “I don’t suppose it is important, Terry.” She took the receipt back from Terence, and went to the door. “I’d only thought it was, and I was wrong. Sorry to disturb you!”

  Terence looked after Phyllis, feeling that familiar half-pleasurable guilt in the pit of his belly. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” he said, but too late—Phyllis had shut the door quietly behind her.

  Taking up, more emphatically, the evaluation sheet before him, an assessment of a Native American poet who was a candidate for one of the coveted “American Master” Feinemann fellowships, determined to read the snarled, crotchety, downward-slanting handwriting even as his thoughts slid like sand in a vertiginous sensual spill Oh love, my love, my Botticelli Venus, how can I be worthy of you his vision misting over with desire.

  And he would have forgotten the incident regarding the receipt, would simply have pushed it out of his mind, as, lately, he was pushing so much out of his mind, with an odd fatalistic cheerfulness, for, increasingly, his life in the house at 7 Juniper Way, Queenston, was somehow not fully real, any more than the handsome house itself (for which he had little time: hadn’t taken up his once-beloved handyman’s tools since last September!), except, a day or two later, he happened to overhear his wife and his mother-in-law conferring in low, querulous voices.

  One murmured as if plaintively, “—don’t understand, I swear I—” and the other, “No one expects you to!” and the first (this was Mrs. Winston), aggrieved, “—what things are coming to!” and Phyllis, as if to humor, “Yes, Mother, and so—why?” and Mrs. Winston, “Your father and I—” and Phyllis, “Yes, Mother—but that was fifty years ago—” and Mrs. Winston, now a bit snappish, “It was not!—and anyway the principle of marriage—” and Phyllis, as if pleading, “Now, Mother—” and Mrs. Winston, “But you and your husband, you—” and Phyllis, quickly, “Mother please, not so loud—” and Mrs. Winston, pettishly, “I would not allow—” and Phyllis, “Oh for God’s sake, Mother—” and Mrs. Winston’s response was muffled, and Phyllis’s rejoinder as well, as if, abruptly, the women were moving away, their backs to Terence, edging out of earshot.

  Terence was on the stairs coming down from the second floor, and the women were in the hall, walking in the direction of the kitchen. At once he froze. Don’t: don’t eavesdrop: turn around and go back upstairs: such behavior is not worthy of you. He felt mildly sick, having overheard a conversation not for his ears, in his very house.

  What was Mrs. Winston speaking of?—and why in such a tone of moral disapproval?

  Surely she could not know, or suspect—?

  “Of course not. Neither of them has any idea.”

  Lately, Fanny Winston’s visits to Queenston were becoming more frequent, and more prolonged. She claimed—and this was of course good news—that her arthritis was less painful, for some reason, in her daughter’s house; she rarely used her wheelchair in Queenston, and often got about quite handily, using a walker or a cane. Since she’d come to stay with them this time, arriving the week before, she’d been using just her cane. The sound and weight of her footsteps, augmented by the hard, hammerlike rap of the cane, had become a familiar feature of the household.

  Terence was fond of his mother-in-law—he believed he was fond of his mother-in-law—who was after all a generous, well-intentioned, lonely woman, a widow, yes and a millionairess: who intends to leave most of her estate to her daughter and her daughter’s family—but he felt a certain strain in the atmosphere when she came to visit; he had the impression, even without eavesdropping, that Mrs. Winston frequently criticized him to Phyllis behind his back, even as, to his face, she was warmly friendly, and even at times a bit flirtatious.

  Ava-Rose understood Terence’s ambivalent feelings about Fanny Winston, as about so much else in his life. How attentive the young woman was, how sympathetic! Saying, when Terence ruefully remarked that he hardly felt at home in his own house, when Phyllis’s mother was there, “Now, Dr. Greene, you can afford to be kind. The old woman won’t live forever.”

  Now that they were lovers, or, at any rate, lovers most of the time—for Ava-Rose, mysteriously, was not always receptive to Terence—Ava-Rose sometimes called him, with quaint, playful formality, “Dr. Greene.”

  “Dr. Greene”—with a slight emphasis upon the “Dr.”

  Unlike “Ter-ence”—the two syllables equally stressed, so that the name, which Terence himself had never liked, had acquired an exotic, foreign-sounding ring.

  Dr. Greene, Ter-ence, you are the kindest man I know, the most generous and courageous man, if only you were truly free to love me—

  Terence stood on the stairs, nerves jangling, considering what to do. He decided to go back upstairs and come down again loudly, whistling, to give the women sufficient warning; out of the range of temptation, for he loathed any sort of duplicity, particularly deceit in his own household. Yet, oddly—his heart pounding as in a dangerous child’s game—he found himself in the hall, approaching the kitchen so stealthily that his footsteps were not only soundless but his body seemingly weightless. Just outside the kitchen doorway he heard Mrs. Winston’s now tearful-angry remark, “Oh! I’m just a contemptible old woman, what do I know!” and Phyllis’s rejoinder, “Now, Mother, please, you’ll just upset yourself—” and Mrs. Winston, “—yes, I mean it: you’d better lay down the law to her: children, it seems, almost aren’t children, nowadays!” And she rapped on the floor sharply with her cane, for dramatic emphasis.

  So Terence relaxed, retreated. The women were discussing Kim now.

  This, Terence did not want to hear.

  (He would have said yes he was thinking of his children, he who had become so passionate and infatuated a lover, yes certainly he thought of them, suffered pangs of guilt about them, yes. He worried about Aaron, and he worried about Kim, and he worried about Cindy yes certainly except he hadn’t time, he meant to think seriously about them, Aaron’s mediocre grades and vague plans for the future, poor sweet Cindy whose latest notion was to become a performance artist, you don’t have to be beautiful you can be yourself, that’s the whole point of performance art you can be yourself, but most of all he meant to think seriously about Kim, so sweetly plump as a small child cuddling in Daddy’s arms now tall as Phyllis and defiantly skinny her heartbreak face her sly smile and gaze shifting rapidly about as she lied to Daddy and Mommy about where exactly she was going, and who would be there, and when she would be back, and even, if they challenged her, about why she lied—these were the things Terence meant
to think seriously about, except he hadn’t time.)

  Your secret is safe with us and this Terence believed unquestioningly but elsewhere wasn’t he vulnerable?—forever at risk?

  For instance, the very evening of the day he’d overheard Phyllis and her mother talking surreptitiously together, Terence walked into his study and saw, to his surprise, Mrs. Winston positioned with her cane in front of his cluttered desk, brazen, unapologetic, sturdy as a three-legged stool. As Terence entered, the elderly woman merely glanced around at him, and smiled complacently. “This desk brings back happy memories,” she said, and seeing Terence’s blank, startled expression, she added, a bit pettishly, “—it was Willard’s, you know. Surely you haven’t forgotten?”

  The massive, heavy mahogany desk, wonderfully broad, with three drawers on either side and a capacious center drawer, was one of the household antiques, yet so long a possession of Terence’s, as a castoff of Phyllis’s parents, that he had more or less forgotten its origin.

  “Of course not, Fanny. I—”

  “I hope not.” Mrs. Winston reared back, as if to demonstrate that she scarcely needed her cane at all. She fixed inquisitive eyes upon Terence, yet she meant to be fondly chiding, coquettish. “I wonder what poor Willard would say, if he saw how disorganized his desk has become?—so much miscellany.”

  Terence was speechless. He’d seen, to his horror, amid the letters, documents, manila folders scattered across his desktop, the sheet of yellow notepaper upon which, working late the night before, he’d dreamily written AVA-ROSE, AVA-ROSE, AVA-ROSE, and HOLYOAK, and CHIMNEY POINT, and RENFREW; even, appallingly, ELDRICK GILL. Had his mother-in-law seen?

  “Terence, is something wrong?” Mrs. Winston’s voice, rising sharply, had an edge to it very like Phyllis’s.

  Terence stammered, “Wrong?—what?”

  “You’re looking at me so—strangely.”

  Terence felt his lips draw back from his teeth in a ghastly semblance of a smile. For a long moment he and Fanny Winston stared at each other. Then, with a faint shudder, the elderly woman drew back. “Well! I can see I’m not exactly welcome here, am I!” she said, hurt.

  Using her cane emphatically, favoring her right leg, with its pitifully swollen ankle, Mrs. Winston brushed past Terence and left the room. Terence, rooted to the spot, did not so much as look after her. He was clenching his fists so tightly, his nails sank into his flesh.

  The old woman won’t live forever.

  “How happy I am! How rich and splendid life is! If only I can hang onto it.”

  In places hostile to romance Terence Greene thought of her whom he loved. It might be said that, in those fevered months, there was rarely an hour, a minute, a passing moment, when he was not thinking of her.

  Especially he thought of Ava-Rose Renfrew (had it something to do with the flurried sensation in the pit of his belly, in his groin?) ascending in one of the elegant glass-backed elevators in his Park Avenue office building, rising swiftly and soundlessly to the ninth floor. The interior of the stately old building had been lavishly renovated to accommodate an atrium that opened to the very roof, which was made of tinted glass and aluminum; the foyer was mauve marble, with a circular fountain, classical in design, spouting streams of bubbly water, at its center. Visitors to the Feinemann Foundation invariably remarked upon the beauty of the atrium, but only recently had Terence begun to notice it again.

  In the beginning, during his first year or so as Executive Director of the Foundation, Terence too had appreciated the airy spaciousness of the building. Then, by degrees, he’d ceased to see it.

  Now, Terence not only saw the dazzling play of lights, glass, polished marble, reflecting metallic surfaces and leaping streams of water, he seemed sometimes to feel it thrumming along his veins; radiating out from the pit of his belly, his groin. Like a man in a waking delirium he thought of the woman he loved, missing her with his body. Oh my love, what can I do to keep you. How can I hold onto you.

  Often now when Terence left the elevator at the ninth floor, if he were reasonably alone, and unobserved, he paused to linger at the railing, to look back down. He pressed his forearms hard against the railing, balancing his weight, and peered over, nine floors below to the alabaster-white fountain with its leaping, darting, scintillating rays of water. The railing was latticelike, and sturdy, open to the height of an average man’s waist; assuredly, there was little danger of falling unless one leaned far over. Yet Terence felt a half-pleasurable sensation of vertigo, dread.

  “And if I fall?—if I fell? What then?”

  It was the morning after he’d surprised Phyllis’s mother in his study; that week when it began to seem that his secret life might be close to exposure, or at any rate more vulnerable to exposure than he’d believed. He’d set his attaché case down, and leaned over the railing, staring down at the foyer until he grew dizzy, and a roaring started in his ears; he felt his body’s helplessness, as at the onset of that plunging sensation that precedes orgasm. My love. My love. Oh my love!

  Then, abruptly, Terence drew back. He was thinking that he dared not fall—“They would audit my accounts, and discover why.”

  Even at meetings of committees, where discussion was likely to be lengthy and acrimonious, and where Terence Greene, affable and courteous and soft-spoken, had to moderate, slyly he thought of her whom he loved.

  Meetings were held around the long executive table in Terence’s office, which could comfortably seat fifteen people. The office itself was large and handsomely furnished; a corner room with a striking view, on clear days at least, of mid-town Manhattan looking toward the East River. Clever Terence so positioned himself that, during his expert judges’ remarks, which were frequently monologues, he could gaze over their heads and out the window dreaming of her whom he loved while frowning and nodding in such a way that flattered the speakers.

  “How well you get along with everyone, Dr. Greene!” his secretary Mrs. Riddle exclaimed, when Terence was new at the Foundation, “—not like poor Dr. Swain, who was always coming down with migraine after these meetings.” Terence did not want to confess that he got along well with egoists because he cared little for his own ego. Those traits of modesty and self-effacement that so exasperated Phyllis, as being insufficiently manly, endeared him to others. Even Quincy Ryder seemed intermittently approving of Terence—in the men’s lavatory at the Foundation, Terence, while in one of the toilet stalls, once overheard Ryder say to an unidentified party, in his droll Virginian accent, “At least, Greene shuts up and lets one talk. He may be a fool, but he knows to do that.”

  But what did Terence care, really—he would preside over the day’s meeting with his “expert judges,” which would include luncheon, with cocktails and wine, and would continue well into the afternoon, and then adjourn. At the midpoint, as lunch was breaking up, he would slip away to call Ava-Rose at Tamar’s Bazaar & Emporium, the telephone number of which he’d long since memorized.

  “Hello darling!” he would murmur, as if, in utter privacy as he was, he might yet be overheard, and at the other end of the line Ava-Rose would give a little cry, in her husky, surprised-sounding voice, “Why—is it Ter-ence? Hello!” and Terence would ask a flurry of little questions, how was she, what had she been doing, and Ava-Rose would delight in telling him, describing even the customers she’d waited on that morning, or a funny conversation with a man who sold her gas for the car (a new-model canary-yellow Corvette) Terence had bought her for Valentine’s Day, or what had happened at the Renfrews’ the evening before, and Terence would listen with half-shut eyes picturing her whom he loved, how anxious he was to keep the conversation flowing, eager, a bit breathless, sparkling like the gushing streams of water in the fountain down in the foyer, and at last he would ask if he could see her that evening? next evening? when? and his heart would seem to pause between beats, awaiting her reply: For even now that they were lovers, and had in fact slept together several entire nights, Ava-Rose declared herself a woman of indep
endent spirit—“I could never be possessed, even by love.”

  Sometimes, however, when Terence excitedly dialed the number of the store, Tamar answered, “Oh, it’s you,” in her flat New Jersey voice, “—sorry, Ava-Rose isn’t in, and I don’t know when to expect her.”

  And when, disappointed, he dialed the number of the house at 33 Holyoak, it was invariably Holly Mae who answered, in her loud, cheery voice, “Hey, h’lo, Doctor! Naw, Ava-Rose ain’t here—this time of day, she’d be over at Tamar’s.”

  He was not jealous of her, and vowed he would never be.

  Seeming to understand that that was the fate of the others: T. W. Binder, Eldrick Gill. Yes and both of them now dead.

  He was not even certain at times that he loved Ava-Rose, maybe he only adored her? Or did he (and this was a subtle point) love the person he himself was, in her presence?

  Recalling her murmured words, after Terence had forced himself upon her that night he’d drunk too much, the night of the attaché case—“Why, Dr. Greene! I never expected such behavior of you!”

  Terence had not expected it of himself.

  He’d begun to apologize, suffused with shame, but Ava-Rose had silenced him with a forefinger to his lips: “It is written, ‘Love that is violence is yet love.’”

  To Terence’s astonishment Ava-Rose continued, in a soft, sleepy, ruminative, rueful voice, “Oh! I do allow I did provoke you just now, Ter-ence! I have that way—I’ve been told.” Kissing the small but bloody wound on Terence’s cheek where her pronged ring had caught his flesh. “And when a woman so provokes, she must be accepting of the consequences—‘All things are ordained.’”

  Terence had felt his heart swell nearly to the point of bursting.

  To be forgiven for having behaved like a drunken brute!—to be so understood, so loved!