Double Delight

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Abruptly then the dream shifted, and Terence was both driving his car, and paralyzed in sweaty, heart-pounding sleep, back at the house, at his desk. He was thinking, in dream-logic, that he would have the alibi, this time—“I am asleep.” He shivered, and laughed. And kept on driving.

  Quickly he was out of Timberlane Estates. North on Route 33, skirting Queenston, driving his car with its terrible burden like one possessed, or a man who has carefully premeditated his actions. (Why else had he kept that carpet remnant for so long, hidden behind the basement steps?) Swiftly and unerringly Terence drove into rural Hunterdon County where, years ago, he’d sometimes taken his young family on Sunday excursions. Again, by dream logic, he located a ravine close by, but not within sight of, Route 22, bouncing along a lane into an area strewn with debris—a no-man’s-land of a dump. Terence backed the Oldsmobile as close as he dared to the edge of the ravine, which was quite steep; he dragged the carpet out of his trunk, and let it fall—rolling, sliding, tumbling—to join shadowy refuse at the bottom.

  I do what I want to do, man. Just like you.

  “My God! How horrible.”

  Terence was leaning over his desk, fighting a sensation of nausea. His left leg tingled with pins and needles now. He did need to use the bathroom; and he did need to sleep. Yet he was so exhausted, and so sickened by his dream, he could not move.

  Not Kim. Not that. No—I can’t believe any of it.

  And it was improbable (even for a nightmare) that Studs Schrieber would die from a mere blow of a flashlight to his head. Improbable that, despite a gash on his forehead, he’d bled fairly sparingly.

  Except—wasn’t there blood, or something resembling smudged rust, on Terence’s fingers? beneath his broken nails?

  And on the front of his rumpled khaki trousers.

  “What?—this can’t be.”

  He shivered, and laughed. He was feeling very strange now.

  In a haze of dread, Terence went downstairs into the basement, to check behind the steps: To his horror, he saw that the old carpet was gone. The space where, on the concrete floor, obscured by cartons and a cast-off bicycle of Aaron’s, it had lain, was now empty—vacant.

  But what about the Camaro, parked across his property line?

  Repentance

  Then it was summer. Humid, seemingly airless. As at the bottom of an ocean. Terence Greene carried himself with the air of a sleepwalker who fears of all things being wakened, yet knows it is inevitable.

  A voice sounded vehemently close by his ear. “The damned thing is, contrary to what most people are led to believe, only a small fraction of crimes in this country is ever ‘solved.’ Even when the police manage to arrest someone, it’s rare there’s a trial—more likely a plea bargaining, with charges reduced. And if there’s a trial, because of our exclusionary laws, a verdict of ‘guilty’ is hard to come by.”

  “Matt, really—you sound so cynical. You, of all people!” A woman’s voice trilled with concern.

  “I’m not cynical, God knows—I’m a realist. A hard-headed realist. In my position, in the township, I have to be. Crime here is definitely on the rise, and people look to their elected officials for help, and what the hell can we do in such an atmosphere? Say a criminal is caught, is found guilty, he has an excellent chance never to see the inside of a prison. This kidnapping case, or ‘hit,’ whatever it is—”

  Since ascending to public office, however minor an office, Matt Montgomery was given to such earnest pronouncements, even at social gatherings; his voice pulsed with excitement and indignation, as if he were declaiming from a dais.

  Terence asked, with a melancholy smile, “What, then, of justice?”

  Matt Montgomery laughed, and let a heavy hand fall on Terence’s shoulder. Evidently he did not consider Terence’s question serious enough to answer.

  They were at the Classens’. Unless it was the Hendries’. Or, indeed, the Montgomerys’. Among their friends, in any case. Terence knew that they were not in their own house because they’d driven here, in his car.

  He sipped at his vodka martini. How strange, his hand did not shake.

  Earlier, as Matt had ambled off whistling to bring them their drinks, Phyllis had whispered, “What is this—vodka martinis, suddenly? Why don’t you have wine, like you used to?”

  Terence said, annoyed, “Vodka martinis have always been my drink.”

  Phyllis stared at him; then cuffed him lightly on the sleeve, as if he’d blundered at making a joke. “Oh, Terry—really!”

  It was the evening of June 17, a full year since Terence had first glimpsed Ava-Rose Renfrew; a full year since the pink summons had brought him to the Mercer County Courthouse in Trenton. He took a large mouthful of his drink, hoping to forget yearning to be with her tonight, and not where he was, amid strangers.

  One of the women called out playfully, “Phyl, Terry is so sweet. Such an intellectual.”

  Phyllis, who was looking very striking tonight, in a white cotton dress that showed her shapely figure to advantage, smiled as if mysteriously. “No need to tell me!” she laughed.

  When they were alone together, Phyllis rarely laughed. Terence felt her brooding, assessing eyes upon him, and thought, She knows.

  And yet—what could she know?

  Matt Montgomery and the others had been talking of the disappearance, in May, of the Schriebers’ son Eddy, Jr. Since the boy had vanished several weeks ago, the Queenston Chronicle, a weekly, had devoted columns of print to the story, though there had been no witnesses to any sort of struggle, nor had local police any leads—they were “continuing their investigation.” The consensus seemed to be that Eddy Jr., though of a prominent local family, had been involved in drug dealing for the past two years; he was said to have been part of a ring operating out of Philadelphia. Anonymous sources were quoted in the Chronicle—“Studs was mixed up with some real tough guys, not like around here,” a senior at Queenston Day School had said. A former girl of his claimed, “Studs used to tell us, he wasn’t afraid to die.” Photographs of the missing boy printed in the Chronicle were not recent, Terence had noted, no doubt because the parents could not bear to see their son, in the community newspaper, in his punk-style phase, with spiky hair, ear studs, and nose ring. Instead, “Edward Schrieber, Jr.” looked to have been a narrow-headed boy with eyes set so close together as to appear mildly crossed, a receding chin, and a boyish, smirking smile. His age might have been anywhere from fifteen to nineteen.

  In fact, Studs Schrieber was nineteen years old—or had been, while living.

  “Edward Schrieber, Jr.” had been reported missing to Queenston police by his parents, when he’d failed to come home after an eighteen-hour absence. His car, a new-model Camaro, was found parked, and locked, at the end of a culde-sac in Fox Haven Estates, a residential community two miles north of Queenston; no one in the neighborhood knew him, or would admit to knowing him (though there were several upper-form Queenston Day students in Fox Haven Estates); residents of the road on which the car had been found insisted they’d seen and heard nothing out of the ordinary that night. According to the Chronicle, police believed that the car had been abandoned there after the boy had been taken away.

  Several ounces of cocaine had been found in the Camaro’s glove compartment, wrapped in plastic, inside a greasy take-out bag from Beno’s Pizzeria.

  “Poor Doris and Eddy!—what a nightmare for them.”

  “Can you imagine? A son not simply missing, but suspected of being a drug dealer? The victim of a ‘hit’?”

  “I shouldn’t say this, but—have any of you seen the kid?” Mickey Classen spoke in a lowered voice. He was a courteous bespectacled man rather like Terence Greene in appearance and manner, a well-to-do investment banker given to long pensive silences and sudden thoughtful, and jarring, remarks. “‘Studs’ used to be a friend of our son David’s, and, God, if anyone ever deserved to be shot and dumped, or whatever—!”

  There followed then a wave of protestati
ons, mainly from the women. Even Phyllis, who had been listening to the conversation with a strained expression, said, shocked, “Oh, Mickey—that’s a terrible thing to say. The boy is human, after all.”

  “‘Is’?—or ‘was’?”

  Terence took another swallow of his drink, which was tasting very cold.

  His dream. His hideous dream. He hadn’t had it since the night of Studs Schrieber’s disappearance and he’d tried not to think of it since.

  Ava-Rose Renfrew seemed to believe in dreams as “divinations,” and so Terence had told her of his dream of killing a man (Terence had not wanted to identify the victim as a boy) who subsequently turned out to have disappeared that very night. “Was this person known to you?” Ava-Rose had asked, with a frowning professional air that Terence found touching, “—or unknown?” “Unknown,” Terence said without hesitation. “Then,” said Ava-Rose, settling the matter, “—he is only a sign, not an entity. Erase him from your memory.”

  Police officers had questioned a number of Queenston Day students, and teachers at the school had asked students to volunteer any information they might have; but, so far as Terence and Phyllis knew, Kim had not been any more involved than most of her friends. When news of the boy’s disappearance first broke, Phyllis had said to Terence, alarmed, “Terry, it’s him—‘Studs’—do you remember? That boy who—” Terence broke in, evenly, “But Kim hasn’t seen him, has she, in months?”

  For days afterward, Terence observed his elder daughter with anxious eyes, but dared not speak to her of the missing boy. (Phyllis assured him, she had. There was “nothing to report.”) Kim appeared excited, distracted, nervous; and then again subdued, preoccupied, and oddly sleepy. Her appetite, always finicky, grew more finicky still; she no longer wore earrings in her pierced ears; if the telephone rang, she did not rush to answer it. Then, at dinner one night, Cindy said, a bit crudely, “That Studs Schrieber, wow!—things they’re saying about him, at school.” She looked intently at Kim, who was not looking at her, and said, with a slight sneer, “Your old boyfriend, Kim. Wow.”

  Kim said, with mechanical quickness, licking her pale lips, “I never see Studs now. Not for a long time.”

  Cindy continued to peer at her sister, shaking her head as if in wonderment. Of course, she was being provoking—“Wow.”

  “Cindy,” said Phyllis sharply, “—that’s enough.”

  But Kim remained subdued, her thoughts clearly elsewhere. She shifted her gaze about, not quite meeting anyone’s eye, and said, so softly Terence had to lean forward to hear, “Not for a long time.”

  How lovely the girl was, even with shadowy dents beneath her eyes, and something swollen and pouty about her mouth! Terence felt his heart swell with love of her, and a fierce desire to protect her. Even from himself.

  Yes, he must move out of the house at 7 Juniper Way. He belonged elsewhere now.

  If they would have him elsewhere.

  Cocktail conversation had meandered from “Eddy Jr.” to more general subjects of crime. Those who had suffered the indignity of being crime victims—in each case, houses had been burglarized, and insurance companies had paid—proffered their stories. Hedy Montgomery told a breathless tale of having nearly been “accosted” in a parking garage in town—“I could see this little Hispanic man out of the corner of my eye, sort of sideways-skedaddling toward me! But someone else came along, in fact it was Marvin Bruns, so I was saved.” Phyllis startled Terence, who had not been following the thread of talk very closely, by telling their friends of how he’d been attacked and robbed in Florida, years ago on their honeymoon—“I never saw Terry looking so fierce! D’you know that expression, ‘blood in his eye,’ well I’m not exaggerating, that’s just what he had. I drove him fast as I could to an emergency room, but I swear, he was so angry, I was afraid of him.”

  Everyone laughed. Terence, who knew that the men were laughing, not at the evoked spectacle of Terence Greene in a fury, but Phyllis Greene’s improbable memory of this fury, joined in the laughter as convincingly as he could.

  Hettie’s boy. Seeking justice, or is it revenge?

  Erase him from your memory and so Terence did, or tried to do.

  He waited for police to come by 7 Juniper Way to ask questions of him, yet no one came. They had not the imagination, evidently, to see how Timberlane Estates was contiguous with Fox Haven Estates, however self-contained each of the “planned residential communities” was. They had not the imagination to see that someone other than drug dealers might have wished to exact vengeance upon a vicious creature preying upon his daughter.

  Still, as the days rapidly fell away, and Terence’s dream faded, he became ever more convinced that it had been a dream, and not something else.

  Hadn’t he fallen asleep at his desk, and awakened at his desk?—in virtually the same position?

  Hadn’t Kim adamantly denied all knowledge of Studs Schrieber? Could Terence doubt his own daughter’s word?

  There was the mystery of the old rolled-up carpet from the family room, gone from behind the basement stairs. Maybe Phyllis had had the trash men haul it away? Terence thought this possible, plausible. But he had not wished to ask her.

  He was not suspicious of Ava-Rose but the summer heat weighed upon his spirit, nor was he jealous of her because Jealousy is the heart’s first death but he did not always believe those damned liars, Tamar or Holly Mae Loomis, when, on the telephone, they claimed not to know where Ava-Rose was or when she might be expected in. “Well, please ask her to call me when she can, will you?” Terence tried to keep his voice light, neither demanding nor pleading.

  How long ago it now seemed, when Ava-Rose would return Terence’s calls promptly, asking for him, at the Foundation, under childlike play-names—“Magnolia Pitts,” “Rose-of-Sharon Wren,” “Petunia Holly-Oak.” Now, days passed and she was too busy to call at all.

  One day, Terence showed up unexpected at the Chimney Point Shopping Center. He was wearing tinted glasses, the sepia-glittering urban-summer air so stung his eyes. As he entered Tamar’s Bazaar & Emporium, the bell above the door clanged as if in alarm. Tamar, waiting on a customer, stared at Terence, blinking as if she did not quite trust her eyes. Dr. Greene? With no warning? He ignored her, and strode over to The Craft of Beauty, which was unattended—no Ava-Rose Renfrew behind the counter. The merchandise looked less distinctive than it had the first time Terence had seen it, but the filmy, brightly dyed fabrics and the exotic jewelry excited his eye. A charmingly inexpert hand-lettered sign read YOUR FORTUNE TOLD!

  But where was the fortune-teller?

  When her customer left, Tamar came quickly over, to where Terence stood thoughtfully stroking and fingering a transparent black muslin dress or smock hanging from a rack. Unasked, Tamar said, “She isn’t here, and I don’t know when to expect her. Whyn’t you try her home?” Terence glanced smilingly at the squat young woman in the absurd royal-blue sari and saw that she was nervous. He said, “Who is her lover now? Do they drive around in my Corvette?” His words, casually expressed, yet hung harshly in the air, like crude incense.

  Tamar drew in her breath sharply. “Dr. Greene!”—as if chiding.

  “He’s a black man, is he?—a sheriff’s deputy?”

  Tamar, staring, did not reply. She was looking at something in Terence Greene’s face he might not have known was there.

  “Or one of the visitors up from West Virginia? I haven’t met them yet, I haven’t been invited to meet them yet, but I know they’re there, at the house.” Terence paused. He had been about to say, “at the house I help pay for,” but that would have sounded too raw, self-pitying. After all a man must have his pride.

  Tamar said in her flat, nasal, mean-sounding New Jersey accent, “Ava-Rose’s private life is her own, mister. She goes her own way, you better believe it, and I go mine.” There was a smug tone to this remark that grated against Terence’s nerves.

  Terence said, “Tell me, please: Was T. W. Binder Ava-Rose’s lover?”
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  Tamar’s small eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  “You know perfectly well who T. W. Binder was. The man who was tried for aggravated assault against Ava-Rose, and who was found guilty and sentenced to prison.” Terence paused. He saw that crafty Tamar was planning to lie. “The man who died in prison.”

  “Died? Gee, when was that?” The young woman’s feigned incredulity was an insult to Terence’s intelligence.

  “Don’t you know when?”

  Tamar shrugged, and giggled, hugging her hefty breasts in the thin silk costume; her midriff, so inappropriately bare, rippled in thin rolls of flesh pale as a chicken’s skin. The red bead in her left nostril glinted, and her oversized gold earrings flashed as if with mirth. Terence had a sudden impulse to close his hands about her throat, so that she would take him seriously.

  Fortunately, he made no threatening move, for Tamar surprised him by saying, negligently, “Well, yeah, I guess I heard T.W. did die—sort of. Last fall. Around Labor Day. Maybe it was Labor Day. I remember because—”

  Labor Day? Hadn’t Ava-Rose told Terence that T. W. Binder had died around New Year’s?

  “‘Because’—?”

  “Ava-Rose had just got back from vacation, and she wanted to go visit T.W. at Rahway, her and me, she was feeling sorry for the poor guy I guess—Ava-Rose always feels sorry for them,” Tamar laughed, “but that doesn’t help them, much—then all of a sudden she tells me it’s too late, T.W. is dead. Or something.”

  Terence swallowed. “What do you mean, ‘or something’?”

  Tamar shrugged again. It was unclear to Terence whether the mannish little woman meant to be flirtatious, or hostile. Her eyes gleamed as if with mischief. “Well, ‘Dr. Greene,’ it is stated in the Guhyasamājantra, ‘To see appearance as an apparition, is to apprehend the apparitional body; to see apparition as ‘open’ (nothing in itself), is to realize The Radiant Light.’”

  “‘The Radiant Light’—?”