Double Delight

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Terence said quickly, “I knew the boy, and I know how his parents have been suffering, so I didn’t want to ask them, but I wanted to know if—well, if there was any hopeful news, any ‘leads’ of any kind.”

  The detective paused. Terence was sure he heard a rapid clicking sound. But since the blows to his head, he often heard such sounds in his left ear and there wasn’t the opportunity—in any case, he didn’t feel he could risk it, even for a fraction of a second—to switch the receiver to his right ear, to ascertain whether the clicking sound was in his head, or in the connection.

  The suspicion of a drug-related abduction and killing of “Eddy Schrieber, Jr.” had never been officially confirmed. It had been a rumor, in fact many rumors, as tributaries flow into a single solid stream, but, so far as Terence knew, it had never been officially confirmed. If the police were following “leads,” they would not be likely to divulge them over the telephone, to a civilian. Wouldn’t “Quincy Ryder” know that? Any adult male resident of Queenston is an intelligent man, wouldn’t he know that simple fact?

  “No, Mr. Ryder, sorry, there’s not.”

  Terence had lost the thread of the conversation. “‘Not—‘?”

  “Not any more news. As of now.”

  “I see.” Terence swallowed, not liking the taste in his mouth. He knew he should hang up, and quickly. But he lingered. (What was that clicking sound? Like the clatter of tiny tin millipedes’ feet, a little army of them.) He said, apologetically, “I—guess your investigation can’t proceed very well without a—body?” When the detective did not reply, he blundered on, stammering—“I guess you haven’t found the boy’s body, yet? I—” Terence felt as if he were on a high diving board, being urged toward the end, the edge. “—I mean I was thinking—all of us are hoping—Studs isn’t dead, but—somewhere—alive.”

  The detective said, “Yes, right, Mr. Ryder, that’s right. Where did you say you live, in Queenston?”

  “I didn’t say I live ‘in Queenston,’ in fact I—I’m somewhere else.”

  Quickly, fumblingly, Terence hung up the receiver.

  And walked quickly away from the pay phone booth in the Queenston train depot, and out onto the boarding platform, to mingle, tall and well-groomed and well-dressed as he was, and carrying a handsome Gucci attaché case, with some sixty or more men and women like himself.

  “Quincy Ryder”: Indeed, the former Poet Laureate of the United States was somewhere else.

  In a cemetery in Charlottesville, Virginia, among numerous Ryders and blood kin.

  The memorial service had been held in New York City, however, in the genteel-shabby headquarters of the Poetry Society of America on Gramercy Square. Terence Greene, though not a close friend of the deceased, had been invited to pay his public respects to him, along with a number of distinguished men and women of American letters. Most of the participants in the ceremony read poems of Ryder’s, in addition to speaking of him; several of the poets read elegies written for him—or, perhaps, being poets, they had elegies on hand, written to honor other deceased friends and fellow poets, and these were appropriate to the occasion, and were duly read. Terence Greene made a striking, and sympathetic, impression upon the gathering: first, because he appeared to be so moved, even agitated, by the occasion (“Terence C. Greene,” whom most of them knew solely by name and reputation, as custodian of the coveted Feinemann fellowships—a formidable person); second, because, not being a poet himself, he had searched for an elegy appropriate to the circumstances, and had discovered a really quite remarkably beautiful poem by Myra Tannenbaum, which, in a quavering but resolute voice, he’d read.

  Get outa here, asshole! Go suck!

  Bleeding from his nose and several cuts on his head, Terence Greene fled Edison Street, Trenton, managing to drive his car shakily but without mishap to northbound Route 1, and he stopped at a gas station near the Mercer Mall, and used the men’s room to wash away the blood as best he could. The pony-tailed attendant looked at him, muttering, “Oh wow,” but refrained from asking questions, nor did Terence offer any explanation. When he arrived home, luck was with him—Phyllis was out.

  It was nine-forty in the evening, and Phyllis was out, at one or another of her meetings. Terence supposed.

  Cindy saw him, however. She was coming downstairs, and she stood very still on the stairs. Abruptly, she began to cry.

  Terence too stood very still. His nose began suddenly to bleed, when he believed it had stopped for the time being; there was a frantic search in his pockets for more tissues. (In fact, they were not tissues but wadded squares of toilet paper he’d taken from the rest room in the gas station.) A churning sensation inside his skull too gave Terence pause.

  Here was the dilemma: He was in terror of collapsing in front of his youngest child, which might happen if he took a step; yet, he could not bear to allow the child to cry uncomforted.

  “Cindy—hey? Honey? It’s just—Daddy.”

  Startlingly, it seemed to Terence that Cindy was not his youngest child any longer. In the weeks, or months, he had not exactly looked at her, she’d gained height, lost weight, and though her healthy face was round as a baby moon, the cheeks were less pudgy, and there was a precocious maturity, an unmistakable adult vexedness, in her expression. Cindy was upset by Daddy’s disheveled, bloodstained appearance, but she was angry, too.

  “Cindy, don’t cry, I—I’m perfectly fine. It was just a, an—”

  Cindy cried, “It already happened like this! I was there! Everything happens double! I hate it! I’m so—scared, Daddy!”

  “On Route 1, I—this other car—”

  Cindy was backing upstairs, making a paddling gesture as if to push Daddy away, should he rush to her. Terence tried to explain further, but Cindy turned and ran, and, frankly, he didn’t have the strength to run after her.

  Never see that treacherous woman again but the days passed without incident, deep into summer, a muggy airless summer like water spilling placidly into water. He wondered how mankind had ever endured peace.

  Ter-ence?—he looked up quickly, squinting, but of course there was no one there.

  He was happy, though. He was at peace. No longer an adulterer. No longer unfaithful to his family. It was midsummer, and it had been midsummer for a long time. He rose early, and he went to bed early. He swam in the pool, coughing and choking as water splashed up his nose which felt to him swollen like a giant zucchini. Never did he dream except continuously of Ava-Rose who had betrayed him. Perhaps it was true, as Phyllis said worriedly, and accusingly, and as Mrs. Riddle suspected, that Terence slept poorly most nights but he rose from bed well rested and eager to begin the day an empty cavity in his chest where his heart had been and that ashy-oily taste in his mouth. His head ached where Ava-Rose’s policeman lover had pistol-whipped him, but he understood he was damned lucky to be alive unlike the others. He drank vodka martinis to soothe his nerves. If Phyllis watched him, he drank vodka martinis where Phyllis could not watch him. In turn, if Phyllis drank (her drink of choice was good French wine, red: That brought out The Radiant Smile as little else could), Terence was too gentlemanly to watch. Or he was not present. He was elsewhere.

  Unlike the others, he was alive. He hoped to remain so for as long as possible.

  “But which police?”

  Often, it seemed, that summer, he was leaning over the railing in the air-conditioned chill, and he woke to such a question. He did not always remember having ascended in the elevator, having stepped out. On the ninth floor. With his attaché case. He was the first to arrive at the Feinemann office, and the last to leave, because he had so much lost time to make up, and he meant to make it up. He meant to make up some of the money (“expenses”) he had embezzled from the Foundation but it worried him that no one had seemed to notice which was an incentive to further crime.

  The elevator spooked him. He shut his eyes, rapidly ascending. On the ninth floor, he swayed slightly as he stepped out, like a man who has been struck a b
low to the head. He recalled how Quincy Ryder had died—swaying-drunk, and losing his balance at the railing, and falling. (Had the doomed man screamed? Terence Greene, shut away in his office, and, as he’d remarked to police, “very likely on the telephone at the time,” had not heard.)

  So he woke to find himself leaning over the gilt latticework railing, shivering in the refrigerated air. Far below, enticing, was the sparkling-white fountain. Sometimes he’d leaned so far over, blood ran into his head, not very pleasantly. His eyeballs throbbed. His nose began to bleed spontaneously. Like tears.

  You must be punished for your wicked heart. If no one will punish you, you must punish yourself.

  His mother had punished him when he’d deserved it. She’d loved him, he was “all she had,” but she’d punished him, too. That was the way of such people in upstate New York, in the foothills of the Adirondacks.

  When he cried, his mother had held him, and rocked him in her arms. Sometimes she’d cried with him. So he knew he was loved.

  When his father punished him, he knew he’d been punished. No mistaking that. Walloping it was called. A man walloped his kid for the kid’s own good, or to teach him a lesson. Rarely, with Terence’s father, was it clear what the lesson was, what the two-year-old could have done to deserve such a walloping. Afterward, Terence’s father did not hold him as he cried. But really Terence could not remember.

  If no one will punish you, you must punish yourself: He accepted that.

  Except—“Which police?”

  He had his choice of the Trenton police, the Manhattan police, the Queenston police. Each department had its specific jurisdiction, of course, and could not intrude upon the others. With the passing of time it wasn’t clear any longer exactly what Terence had done to merit confession and punishment but that was what the police were for, presumably.

  Walloping which he deserved. If only not such a coward. And so highly regarded in the community. In his profession. A man of integrity, honor. A gentleman. A nice man. And his children—surely they did not deserve public shame, humiliation. And his wife.

  “No, I can’t. I simply can’t. The children, Phyllis—I can’t drag them into this.”

  Terence must have been leaning dangerously far over the railing, for blood rushed into his head, and he woke to his surroundings with a panicked start.

  “No.”

  And the days passed. Weeks. And he had never felt such grief he exulted in his autonomy, his freedom from bondage. For what is erotic love but bondage?—the flesh contaminated by its greed.

  Ava-Rose, how could you betray me!

  How pleased with himself “Dr. Greene” was: never once giving in to the temptation to call either of the Trenton numbers his fingertips had long ago memorized.

  If Ava-Rose called him, if she begged his forgiveness, making the first move toward a reconciliation—would Terence return to her?

  “Yes.”

  No.

  “I mean—no.”

  Yes.

  After all, a man must have his pride.

  Where is your pride?—never would he forgive the woman, for saying such a thing, in public. In the hearing of strangers.

  Never again those lovely white arms, the softness of her breasts, voluptuous sleepy-playful kisses never see that treacherous woman again.

  When he’d so extravagantly taken out the $500,000 insurance policy on his life, sole beneficiary Miss Ava-Rose Renfrew, he’d wanted to impress her (why not admit it?) and so he’d paid, with a cashier’s check, the entire first-year premium. Which took him to May 1 of the next year. Why?—because I adore you, I want to prove myself to you, how like a husband I might be. A supremely foolish gesture, and yet Terence did not feel he could cancel out the policy and get some of his money back—what would Ava-Rose and the rest of the Renfrews think?

  “And if something happened to me, at least they would be provided for.”

  One evening he sat with Mickey Classen on the train to Queenston. He heard himself say, with the blundering, eager air of a man with knowledge to impart, “Mickey, I’ve come to realize that the one thing that really matters is family, home. So little else is real.” Where one of their more exuberant, shallow-minded friends would have interrupted with grunts of affirmation, Mickey sat silent; perhaps a bit embarrassed, but attentive. Terence said, in a lowered voice, “A while back—it was years ago, actually—I nearly made a terrible mistake. I think of it often. As if, somehow, I’d been overcome by a sort of—impersonal madness. What is the fancy term—crise. My God, what a tragedy it would have been, for me! But I drew back in time. I managed to save myself, and my family.” He was red-faced now and floundering, and he’d said more than he had wanted; the single vodka martini he’d had before getting on the train must have gone to his head. Yet Mickey seemed sympathetic, in his frowning silence, so Terence felt encouraged. “I don’t suppose you, Mickey, have ever—? Come close to—? The same sort of—mistake?”

  Never since moving to Queenston, New Jersey, and claiming his place as a resident not an interloper but one who belonged there by rights had Terence, the least aggressive of men, risked so raw an appeal to another man; indeed, to any woman. (Including Phyllis.) It was not simply that Terence wasn’t the type, which of course he was not: All Queenston men shun such intimate disclosures, out of an anxious presentiment that, if they accept them, they must then offer intimate disclosures of their own. Before his crise, Terence would have been appalled had any of their Queenston friends, including Mickey Classen, appealed to him in such a crude, clumsy fashion. He would have sat stiff in his seat, as Mickey was doing, gazing with a small frown at his ticket stub affixed to the rear of the seat in front of him; a boyish blush would have risen from his throat into his clean-shaven cheeks, and his necktie, impeccably knotted to the throat, would have begun to feel very tight. He would have cast his mind about, wondering how in God’s name to reply.

  Terence said, with a nervous, shamed laugh, “—Of course, it was years ago. I don’t know why I bring the subject up now. I”—he floundered absurdly—“don’t know.”

  Tactful Mickey Classen had always reminded Terence, in small ways, of himself: They were about the same age, and had the same ectomorph build; each man was shy, yet had learned to be warmly sociable; spoke with authority, yet quietly; was inclined to sobriety in repose, but quick to smile. In the presence of such “charismatic” personalities as Matt Montgomery, each man was likely to be overlooked.

  Yet bore the bastard no grudge. Certainly!

  Though Mickey Classen was wealthy, having made a fortune in the investment banking boom of the 1980s, neither he nor his wife Lulu seemed affected by money; Terence had long felt a keen sort of envy, that the Classens’ son David, one of Aaron’s high school friends, had grown into such a good, decent, hard-working kid—“And they’d started off, it almost seemed, like brothers,” Phyllis herself had marveled.

  Vaguely too Terence had envied Mickey Classen his marriage: not his sweet, rather placid and bland wife Lulu, exactly, but the ease, the stability, the sense of a match between equals, which was, both on the surface and intimately, the antithesis of Terence’s own. Now the alarming thought struck him: What if Mickey told Lulu about this ridiculous conversation, and Lulu told Phyllis? The two women were not close friends yet, Terence knew, there is a sense in which, unlike men vis-à-vis men, all women are friends.

  It might have been his breeding—Mickey Classen was the most tactful of men. He cleared his throat, and, reaching for his attaché case, at his feet beside Terence’s, he said, gently, “Terry, I’d guess that we all come close to making ‘tragic mistakes’ sometimes—we wouldn’t be fully human if we didn’t. But”—here Mickey glanced at his companion, with a pinched sort of sidelong smile of the kind Terence sometimes gave himself in the mirror, a smile both embarrassed and forgiving—“as long as we don’t make them, and don’t talk about them, is it very important, really?”

  The lush, tangled garden. Smelling of sun, heat. B
right flowers amid the weeds. Zinnias, roses. Those gorgeous creamy-pink roses. He reached out to touch a rose, and its petals, riddled with tiny holes like shot, scattered to the ground. An iridescent-shelled beetle flew up into his face, with an angry high-pitched clicking sound.

  “No—help!”

  “Dr. Greene—?”

  Terence looked up, startled, to see Mrs. Riddle in the doorway. She must have knocked, and mistaken his outburst for an invitation to enter the office. He smiled at her as if nothing were wrong, and he hadn’t just been having a waking dream, or a hallucination, at his desk. “Yes, Thelma?” His right hand was shut tight into a fist, the beetle trapped inside.

  It was nearing the end of July. Soon, it would be August. And then Labor Day. In the fall, work at the Feinemann Foundation quadrupled as thousands of fellowship applications and grant proposals flooded in. Terence could not bear to contemplate the future without Ava-Rose and the others so in fact he’d astonished the chairman of the board who was his immediate superior, and the office staff, by informing them he would not be taking his customary three-week vacation in August. He had so much work to do, he intended to come into the office five days a week, even while his staff was away—“I’ve always found vacations deathly boring.”

  He hadn’t yet told Phyllis and his children of these plans. He supposed they would object.

  Mrs. Riddle, who revered Terence Greene excessively, certainly disapproved. He was touched by her solicitude, and made guilty by it; he knew he did not deserve it. For months, this good-hearted woman had deciphered Terence’s haggard looks, his ghastly shadowed eyes and sickly grin as evidence of overwork. He was, indeed, “working himself to death.” He assured her that he was, yes, seeing a doctor, in fact a neurologist (though not the one she’d recommended)—“Except, the problem isn’t in my brain but in my mind.” Terence had laughed to suggest that this was a joke, but Mrs. Riddle had not joined in.