Double Delight

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Terence retreated, not wanting to be seen. His heart was beating in a way disagreeable to him.

  “‘Jealousy is the heart’s first death’”—so Ava-Rose had chided Terence when he’d complained that it was difficult to get hold of her by telephone.

  Terence quickly retraced his steps to the Plaza, and was waiting there, leaning over a railing, when, a minute later, Ava-Rose appeared, running. In her long, filmy skirt, gypsy-jewelry flashing, waist-long crinkly cloudlike hair whipping in the wind, she had an appealingly girlish-gawky look; two middle-aged men with attaché cases, descending the Plaza steps as Ava-Rose flew up, stared at her openly. Terence was reminded of the first time he’d seen this mysterious young woman, on that June morning, gusty and sun-lit like this, nearly a year ago—she’d been running, like that, heedless of traffic as she crossed Market Street against the light. Legs in daffodil-yellow tights, an emerald-green silk jacket with a rainbow stitched to its back. Beautiful girl. A stranger to Terence Greene.

  And where, so unexpectedly, had she run—up the steps and through the revolving doors of Trenton Police headquarters.

  Terence had many times wanted to ask Ava-Rose about her involvement with the Trenton police and the Mercer County district attorney’s office: Had they helped her prepare her testimony for Binder’s trial? Was T. W. Binder a local problem authorities wanted behind bars, whatever the charges? But he dared not ask, for such questions displeased Ava-Rose—“It is written, ‘Seek not confusion, lest ye find it.’” If she was unhappy, Terence was quickly made to become unhappy.

  Nor had he pressed her on the death (murder?) of T. W. Binder in prison; or on the details of her relationship with either Binder or Eldrick Gill. And there was the mysterious matter of, what was the man’s name, Applewine, Wineapple—“Ezra Wineapple.”

  Once, casually, Terence had asked Chick who “Mr. Wineapple” was, and Chick had said, with such affable readiness it was impossible to suspect he might be lying, that the “old guy” had been “one of Auntie Holly’s boyfriends” from the Chimney Point Senior Citizens’ Center where “the whole gang of ’em used to play bingo, Thursday nights, and Auntie finally got kicked out she won so many jackpots they thought she must be cheating somehow, but, shit—how d’ya cheat at bingo?” Chick had squinched his mouth so, pronouncing “bingo,” as if there were no other word in the English language so preposterous, Terence had had to laugh.

  No, Terence had to admit, he hadn’t the slightest idea how one might cheat at bingo.

  “Ter-ence! There you are!” Ava-Rose cried, with the slightest suggestion of a pout, “—I didn’t know which side to come, this darn ol’ place is so big.”

  Long-legged and energetic, Ava-Rose came rushing to Terence, who greeted her fondly, and kissed her on her lips, rather hard, as she didn’t quite enjoy, in a place so public.

  Just in case you’re watching, Officer.

  In the elevator going up to Metropolitan Life Insurance offices on the eleventh floor, Ava-Rose squeezed Terence’s hand, shivering.

  “It’s an adventure, just being here with you—this place I’ve never been.” Ava-Rose was wide-eyed; and spoke sincerely. One of the traits in her Terence so loved was the young woman’s childlike wonder and appreciation of life.

  “I was a little worried, waiting for you,” Terence said. “I’d hoped nothing had happened to you, dear.”

  Ava-Rose bit her lower lip, and looked at Terence quizzically. She squeezed his hand again in her thin, strong fingers, as if to gently reprove him. “Ter-ence, nothing can happen to me! Not in this quarter. Didn’t I tell you, my progressed Venus has quincunxed my natal Moon and semisextiled natal Pluto, so there’s a sesquiquadrate to natal Moon and a semisquare to natal Pluto.” She laughed, seeing his expression. “I’m fine.”

  Terence laughed, for the issue of astrology was one of the lovers’ conflicts; not a serious conflict, but one that allowed Ava-Rose to lecture him, and chide him a bit, and allowed Terence to tease her, fondly as he’d used to tease his children about one or another of their silly, harmless pastimes. Laughing, though the rapid ascent in the elevator was making him short of breath for it reminded him of the elevator in his building in Manhattan reminding him of his enemy’s flushed hateful face and its transformation into a face of unspeakable horror as he staggered backward and fell against the railing and—

  Ava-Rose had slipped her arm through Terence’s, turning her snub-nosed face up into his, prettily chiding. “I wish I could cast your horoscope, Dr. Greene!—you’d see, then, how ‘All things are possible, because all things are ordained.’ Can’t you find out the exact time of your birth, somehow? Your mother—”

  Terence said flatly, “My mother has been dead, Ava-Rose, for—most of my life.”

  The statement seemed simply to utter itself. Terence had not known this fact, if it was a fact, until this moment.

  “Dead—?” Ava-Rose’s smooth forehead crinkled in immediate sympathy. “You said she and your father had abandoned you, but—”

  “Never mind, dear. We won’t talk about it now.”

  “But—are you sure? I mean, if you hadn’t seemed to know, and—”

  The elevator stopped at the eleventh floor, and now Terence’s shortness of breath was pronounced. But he would overcome it: As soon as he stepped into the corridor, seeing there was no open space before him, no atrium, he would be all right. And so it was.

  Terence said quietly to Ava-Rose, who could always be depended upon, out of instinctive sympathetic tact, not to ask questions of him he did not want asked, “We’ll talk about it another time, Ava-Rose.”

  “Or never,” said Ava-Rose gently, “—if you prefer.”

  Arm in arm Terence and Ava-Rose entered the glass-fronted reception room of the Metropolitan Life insurance office, and more than one person, male, female, visitor or office worker, glanced curiously at them. A distinguished-looking middle-aged man in a business suit, a flamboyantly pretty hippie-style girl spangled with inexpensive jewelry—a striking couple, yes? Terence’s vanity was excited by such attention from other men; yet he knew it was a brazen, reckless thing to do, appearing in this corporate setting with a woman hardly his wife, nor any woman who might be plausibly explained to his wife should a report somehow make its way back to Phyllis.

  (Did Phyllis suspect?—or, somehow, know? Terence was feeling less guilty about his family than he had at the start of his infatuation with Ava-Rose, for it seemed to him lately that they hardly had time for him. Phyllis was caught up in Queenston Opportunities, and in suburban social life, which seemed endlessly to excite her; Kim had her equally demanding teenaged life, to which high school work seemed but an appendage; even Cindy was demonstrably less interested in Daddy, now that she’d joined the drama club at Queenston Day. More than ever, Terence needed the Renfrews—“How lonely my life would be, without them!” He felt so estranged from Aaron, he sometimes forgot he had a son at all.)

  Seated in the reception area, waiting to see Mr. Post, Terence at last weakened, and asked Ava-Rose, who was flicking through back issues of Fortune and Business Life, the question he’d vowed, down on the plaza, he would not ask. “That man you were talking with in the parking garage—who was he?”

  “Man? What man?”

  “It looked as if he was a policeman. A sheriff’s deputy.”

  Ava-Rose shook her head, slowly. Her lovely amber-green eyes were perfectly clear. “I didn’t notice any man,” she said. “Where was he? In the parking garage—?”

  “I might have been mistaken. I thought I saw you and a sheriff’s deputy talking together. But never mind.”

  Ava-Rose’s lower lip protruded in that way Terence had come to adore—the mock-pouty, mock-sullen, “misunderstood” Renfrew mannerism. She gave a little cry, “Ter-ence, you know I don’t like policemen—they give me the shudders! Walking around ready to shoot one of us down dead with their darn ol’ pistols!”

  That was May first: the day Terence Greene took out a $500,0
00 insurance policy on his life, the sole beneficiary Ava-Rose Renfrew, 33 Holyoak Street, Trenton, New Jersey. It was an extravagant gesture but, Terence thought, the least he could do—seeing that, in panicked cowardice, he’d crossed out Ava-Rose’s name on the list of Feinemann award winners, before the police arrived.

  “Death by misadventure”—so the New York City coroner had ruled in the shocking case of the ex-Poet Laureate Quincy Ryder. Still, weeks later, rumors circulated in literary circles that the poet had committed suicide. Ryder was known to have been an alcoholic, and deeply unhappy; he’d studied with, and been influenced by, the poet John Berryman, also an alcoholic, who had committed suicide years ago by jumping off a Minneapolis bridge. There was even the rumor, denied by Ryder’s survivors, that he’d had AIDS.

  Ryder had died immediately upon impact, after having plunged nine floors through the atrium of the near-deserted building; the coroner’s autopsy showed alcoholic intoxication, and the security guard who’d let Ryder into the building (twice, within a few minutes) testified that Ryder was “so drunk, going up, both times I had to press the elevator button for him. And all the man done was say, ‘Thank you, boy,’ and not even look at me.”

  The security guard was believed to be the last person to have seen Ryder alive.

  Terence Greene, Executive Director of the Feinemann Foundation, with which Ryder had been associated for the past nine months, had been interviewed at length by investigating detectives; though clearly shaken by the poet’s death, Terence had been fully cooperative. He had not known Quincy Ryder well, and had never had a conversation with him not related to official matters, but he’d respected the poet enormously for his contribution to American letters and for the outspoken honesty of his opinions. On the day of the accident, Ryder had had a disagreement with the other fourteen members of the committee he was serving on, and walked out; the implication was that he would not be back. Yes, he’d been drinking, a bit.

  The investigating detectives asked Terence if, in his opinion, Quincy Ryder had had a “drinking problem”; if he appeared to be “despondent” about anything. Terence said, after a pause, “Yes, Mr. Ryder certainly had a drinking problem, but I didn’t have the impression he was despondent, exactly. Rather more, he seemed to me angry.”

  Angry—about what?

  “That was the mysterious thing, and all who knew him commented on it,” Terence said softly. “He appeared to be angry at all of mankind. At life.”

  As for the circumstances of Quincy Ryder’s actual death, Terence could provide little information. He gave his account several times of what he knew—“After the committee disbanded, I stayed in my office working, as I usually do. It was a little after six, when I heard a noise out in the corridor, like a raised voice or voices, and by the time I went out to investigate, Quincy Ryder had already fallen. His body was down below—on the fountain ledge. I looked over the railing and there was Mr. Jamahl”—it was Terence’s custom to address the security guard in this formal, courteous way—“by the body, shouting for help. By that time, of course—” Terence’s voice quavered and trailed off into silence. His eyes flooded with tears and his rather gaunt, distinguished face seemed suddenly the face of a mourner.

  One of the detectives asked Terence if he thought that Quincy Ryder might have thrown himself deliberately over the railing, and Terence said, again after a pause, quietly, “I think it must have been—an accident. A tragic accident.”

  And not suicide?

  “Well—wouldn’t suicide be, in such a case, a tragic accident?”

  And was Terence Greene sick with guilt over the death of Quincy Ryder?—this terrible secret he could share with no one on earth, not even Ava-Rose Renfrew for whom the man had died?—yes certainly he was certainly not: once some bastard hurts you he’ll need to hurt you again if you don’t stop him carrying the knowledge of it, the horror, everywhere with him for he was after all a man of integrity, a decent law-abiding and -respecting man, husband, father, member of a highly paid American professional class, yes and with a Ph.D. as well an adulterer who exulted in sin and had never been so happy in his life until now in terror of exposure, and all coming to an end: his very life.

  One thing Terence knew, and vowed—“I must never kill again.”

  The old woman won’t live forever. You know that.

  And now to Terence’s secret “expenses” was added the costly quarterly premium of the $500,000 life insurance policy. (Of course, the policy was worth it: In case of Terence’s sudden death, how would Ava-Rose and her family be provided for, otherwise? Terence could not be so selfish and short-sighted as to fail to think of their welfare.) And there were the monthly payments on the Renfrews’ mortgage; and a sizable bill, for May, from a Trenton plumber for “emergency” repairs (a pipe had broken, the basement was flooded); a painter had been engaged, and then, for some reason (a disagreement with Cap’n-Uncle Riff?) disengaged, to do some painting on the outside of the house, and there was a bill for his services—a surprisingly high one, considering how little he’d finally done. And there was the twins’ orthodontist’s bill. And more money to be paid to Holly Mae’s team of lawyers (who were hinting of nearing a “substantial settlement” with the Trenton Transit Company). And the monthly payments on Ava-Rose’s Corvette.

  All these, “expenses.”

  For a secret life is expensive.

  Yet more: In a sentimental gesture, lying one night in Ava-Rose’s arms, upstairs in her prettily decorated little bedroom, in her funnily creaky old brass bed, Terence had impulsively agreed to buy Chick a new bicycle; since, as Ava-Rose pointed out, Terence was so generous with Dara and Dana, she was afraid Chick’s feelings were beginning to be hurt. But, to Terence’s astonishment, the bicycle, which Chick himself selected, turned out to be a sleek Italian model with twenty-one speeds, priced at $640!

  Yet more upsetting, this very bicycle was stoken from Chick within fourteen days of its purchase—“Some black kids, with knives, I sure wasn’t gonna mess with them.”

  To add to all this, another greater expense loomed: Ava-Rose had long yearned to move out of Tamar’s Bazaar & Emporium and set up The Craft of Beauty in a stylish little boutique of her own; not at the rundown Chimney Point Shopping Center, but at upscale Quaker Bridge Mall on Route 1. This Terence wanted too, for Ava-Rose’s sake, and of course he intended to finance the move; but he knew from Phyllis’s experience leasing a tiny office on Queenston Square that such properties were expensive. What a pity, though, that Ava-Rose’s lovely things had been hidden away, for years, in that dreary store in Trenton! Her distinctive clothes, purses, jewelry—Terence would have liked to set the gifted young woman up in a boutique on upper Madison Avenue, but the expense was prohibitive; also, shrewdly, he would not have wished, perhaps, for her to be exposed to New Yorkers. To male rivals, suitors.

  Poor Ava-Rose: Terence had never dared tell her that she’d been slated for a $40,000 annual stipend for five years, courtesy of the Feinemann Foundation; except, in panic at being found out, and linked with Quincy Ryder’s death, Terence had eliminated her name after all.

  “She would be so hurt!—and never forgive me.”

  Terence was thinking of these things, and other related matters so many expenses! hidden costs! driving to pick up his mother-in-law at a hairdresser’s in the village, one Saturday afternoon in late May. His brain fairly buzzed. He would have felt guilt but why? hadn’t both men deserved to die? but, increasingly, he had no time; he was forced to think of financial matters. He, Terence Greene, who yearned only to think of romance, and love; and doing the right thing by the Renfrews.

  What had that sympathetic young woman assistant at the vet’s said—poor old fella? Or had it been lucky old fella?

  So far, Terence had been lucky. Damned lucky. Not in having gotten away with murder no: those were accidents, not murders but in shifting “expenses” about, from one account to another; instead of continuing to have his Foundation salary automatically credited
, in full, to his Merrill Lynch account in Queenston, he now had the check, which was precisely $12,500 a month, converted into cash, so that he could use as much as he needed, or dared, before putting it into the account. The Feinemann Foundation, lavishly endowed, was generous with its executives’ claims for miscellaneous expenses, and so Terence did not hesitate to claim, for instance, $1,000 while away at a conference in another city—even if, some of the time, he was in fact in Trenton. (He had learned too the conventioneer’s trick of acquiring a dinner tab for a table of associates, each of whom paid for his own meal. What a windfall, a few weeks ago, at the Ritz Carlton in Boston; Terence had “hosted” a dinner for twelve men and women, like himself attending a conference in the humanities at Boston University: The bill had come to a staggering $1,460.) At about the time Terence signed on for the $500,000 life insurance policy, he’d begun a new, damnedly belated, procedure: When he dealt with Phyllis’s mother’s actuary, who was entrusted with investing money from her pension fund, he insisted that the actuary split all commissions with him—otherwise, he would not consent to a deal. (Mrs. Winston, though shrewdly money-minded, was finicky about small matters rather than large; it would never have occurred to her, as rarely it occurs to elderly widows of her type, to question her very advisors.)

  Mrs. Winston’s actuary had so readily consented to Terence’s request, Terence had the idea that such arrangements must be made all the time.

  “And it isn’t illegal—I’m sure.”

  Still, Terence could not continue at such a frantic pace, indefinitely. And new expenses looming, new hidden costs. I must never kill again. Must never. His brain buzzed as if with a malevolent interior vibration that, sourceless, could not be switched off.