Beautiful Days: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  There was Martha Graham moving in her tense angular way, as if pushing against a substance denser than air. Suddenly you could see the space about her yearning body: how it resisted her, how she defined her body in resistance to it, ever pushing, pressing. The eerie precision to the dance, that would have seemed to him, at another time, in other circumstances, loosely free and improvised.

  “I think—I’m thinking of us. How we’d be seen, seventy years from now. If someone was filming us. Recording us.” She laughed, whispering. She was embarrassed by her emotion, as he hadn’t seen her. He wanted to console her, make light of her remark—except it wasn’t a remark that indicated fear, or unhappiness—rather, it was matter-of-fact.

  She knew nothing of the surreptitious photos he’d taken. He had sequestered them away in his computer. A naked woman, a naked woman so trusting she’d fallen asleep, mouth slightly open, mouth damp . . . She’d have been furious, and possibly she’d have been offended in a deeper, more primitive way, as if he’d stolen something from her she hadn’t even known she had lost.

  When they left the little theater, she’d made a gesture of walking ahead of him, stepping singly out into the lighted lobby, but he’d been close beside her, gripping her hand. She said, “I’m so happy that I could share this with you. But I think—I think this is something of a mistake, a blunder, I mean the risk . . .” She pulled her hand from his, and he gripped it harder. There were only a few people in the lobby, he had to know they might be women who might know his wife, might be women who knew him, yet stubbornly he accompanied her out to the street, some measure of the dancer’s defiance had entered his spirit, the hell with risk, the hell with caution.

  “In seventy years we’ll both be dead. So?”

  HE SAW HIS WIFE STRUGGLING with the kitchen door. She was outside, and struggling to unlock it. She was holding two grocery bags awkwardly in her arms, her face was vexed, peevish. Her eyeglasses glared with light. Had he locked the damn door against her? Had she gone away and locked it against herself? For a moment he held back, considering. Then quickly he came to the door, quickly he opened it and took the grocery bags from her.

  “There you go.”

  There. You. Go.

  LATE AUTUMN, WINTER, LATE WINTER and spring—(as usual, the cold-grudging spring of upstate New York)—he didn’t want to calculate the months, the anniversaries they were beginning to forget, Tuesday, Friday, the several times they’d had to cancel meeting in the room; her cell phone ringing in distress, his cell phone ringing in distress. Less than six months swallowed up in the more than twenty years of his marriage as a shrinking ice floe is swallowed up, melting, disappearing into the ravenous rushing Blue River.

  She’d been saying in her mock-wistful way what about a life elsewhere, downstate. She’d been saying lately that her work at Fowler’s that had so bored her initially was now engaging her, assisting the editor on an introductory college linguistics textbook. “I thought I didn’t care for this job, I’d been resenting it, it’s just a job, part-time, there are so many other things I’d hoped I could do with my life, but—I’m sort of fascinated by this—language, syntax—the way words emerge out of nowhere, you could say—the way words fit together and are in a sense ‘objects’—in some languages especially. There’s a chapter on visual speech, written language, cuneiform—‘pictographs’—how these were replaced by another kind of alphabet—and became extinct . . .” The wonder of it seemed to grip her, as if no one had had such thoughts before.

  She was thinking (maybe) she would work as an editor somewhere downstate. Or (maybe) (he didn’t want to ask) she was envisioning returning to college, taking courses in linguistics—“It’s like that’s the key to so much of being human.”

  (There was this side of her he didn’t quite recognize. Intellectual, aggressive. Dissatisfied, as she was ambitious. Not a hint of this in the girl he’d seen on the pedestrian walkway, sexy blood-red mouth and white skirt lifting in the wind about her hips. But she’d allowed him to know, with disarming casualness, that she’d gone to a very good university—in fact, Cornell. She’d had a scholarship covering full tuition. Studying psychology, economics. Had to drop out junior year, return home to help her mother deal with her demented, slow-dying father.)

  (He had gone to Colgate, later transferred to Syracuse and got his law degree at Cornell. But their years in Ithaca had not overlapped.)

  When they’d first met she had confided in him recklessly, dazzling him with secrets, now she confided in him in the way of a needy person, to sink hooks into him. (He was thinking.) It wasn’t sexually provocative now, this candor. He didn’t find it attractive.

  He was beginning to be frightened of her, of what she could wreak in his life. His was a Rutherford life, no matter how lightly he took it. Being Rutherford you had to acknowledge how whatever you did could cast ruinous light on others with that name; you had to acknowledge, if you weren’t too full of yourself to understand, how you owed it to others bearing that name a measure of discretion. It frightened him to think how casually, how idly, how randomly the woman might destroy his life that might look to her shining and solid as a great suspension bridge but which he knew to be precarious as a miniature bridge made of cards.

  He thought—But she doesn’t really mean it. She doesn’t want to break up our families. She is just testing me.

  HE’D BEGUN TO NOTICE: she wasn’t so poised as he’d thought.

  She was a good-looking woman but not a beautiful woman. Something almost coarse in her laughter, the snorting flaring nostrils, bared wet teeth. The way she straddled him, which he’d liked originally, now he liked less, it had come to seem to him predictable, plotted. And she was heavy, for a slender woman. Muscled legs and thighs, and shoulders strong as a swimmer’s.

  More often now they walked together. If anyone observed, they’d become friends: Tom Rutherford and the dark-red-haired woman who was no one anyone knew, not likely a lawyer or paralegal from his office though probably not one of the office staff either, judging by the way she behaved with him, laughing up into his face.

  He saw eyes moving onto them. He thought so.

  And he’d begun to notice: she wasn’t so secure as he’d thought.

  She was jealous of his interest in other people, fleeting as it was. Jealous of his decision to pause on the street or in a park, take a photograph of—whoever. As they walked together often without speaking. Or, if she was speaking to him, he wasn’t listening but glancing covertly about.

  It was his nature, he wanted to protest. Couldn’t help his curiosity!

  She observed him squatting to exchange remarks with a toddler, as the child’s mother looked on. Beautiful little caramel-skinned girl and the mother fleshy-bodied and pretty—dark Caribbean face, eyes shining with excitement. A stranger can make another stranger happy, so quickly.

  She felt a tinge almost of rage. Her lover was promiscuous in his soul.

  HE’D WANTED TO BE a great photographer. He’d traveled to Rochester, to Buffalo, to New York City to see photography exhibits. Not for years now, but when younger. Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Robert Capa, Irving Penn his heroes. Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson. Just the fact of lifting a camera, fitting his eye to the lens was exciting to him, or had been.

  Happiness is being in one place. The picture fixes you in one place.

  HE WASN’T A PARENT of young children, as she was. His children were adolescents, no longer very interested in him, unimpressed with Dad. Neither had the slightest inclination to follow him into law. Neither took photography seriously though both took pictures with their cell phones, constantly. He thought—Still, they respect me. They would be devastated if our family broke up.

  The wife remained brave, blind. The wife remained resolute and unknowing, blind as the carved figure on the prow of a ship braving all weather.

  TENTATIVELY SHE SAID, I think we should stop.

  He didn’t hear. Didn’t reply. Didn’t refute.

  ALL THOSE WE
ARE HURTING, if they knew. Those who believe that we love them exclusively. If they knew but of course they don’t know, we will never tell them. Because we love them, when we are with them. As we love each other, in this place.

  SHE THOUGHT— none of this has happened. Not in my real life.

  SHE COULD NOT BEAR IT, the intense sexual sensation. It was a kind of seizure. Dark-feathered wing falling sharply in her brain, and then oblivion. In that second she was gone, she could barely move.

  He said, Hey. He was concerned, edgy.

  He said, Darling? I’ve got to get back. OK?

  She felt a rush of hatred for him, that he could speak so casually, in his ordinary voice. That he could speak at all.

  Darling is such a cheap word. Worn like a copper penny, that smells in the hand.

  In the bathroom she fumbled dressing. Why didn’t he go alone and leave her here, did he think she’d steal something, or leave a demented message on a mirror for someone to discover and raise an alarm. Always waiting for her, she had to use the damned toilet, she knew he was restless thinking of driving home. At a certain point, the man’s brain prepares itself for the next sequence of actions, the next scene. The old scene begins to fade.

  God damn she’d dropped something, out of her bag. Groping for her toothbrush on the floor that was gritty and needed cleaning. (Why was she always dropping things? Was this new?) (She was frightened: that creeping numbness, sometimes, in her upper spine.)

  “Darling? Are you all right?”—tapping at the door, though he’d never have been so rude as to try the doorknob to see if she’d locked it against him.

  IN A SICK FANTASY, he’d seen a woman naked in a bathtub sprawled and moaning, and the bathwater rosy with blood from her slashed wrists. He’d seen the bathwater splashed onto the floor. He’d tried the doorknob but the door had been locked against him.

  My God my God my God! This can’t have happened.

  ONCE SHE SAID SUDDENLY, Are you comparing me with her? You promised you would not.

  Shocked he protested, Of course I am not! I would not—I could not do that . . .

  You are not of her world. She is not of yours. It would be like speaking two languages.

  HE’D READ AN INTERVIEW with an executioner at one of the Texas penitentiaries. Capital punishment—(as it was euphemistically called: not capital murder)—was exacted in that state by “lethal injection.” It was administered by more than one person, but one man alone was the official executioner; he was the person who delivered the death warrant to the condemned prisoner, incarcerated on death row. All very proper, ritualized! No doubt, there is solace in ritual, at such times. For both executioner and condemned man.

  Except, the executioner was retiring. Still relatively young, in his early fifties, but he was retiring—“It catches up with you.”

  Couldn’t bear it, so many condemned men. So many ritual-deaths.

  And he, Tom Rutherford, was thinking—“It catches up with you.”

  He loved her too much. He was distracted from his wife, his children. So distracted from his work, he believed the office staff talked of him worriedly.

  The first to know Something is wrong with Mr. Rutherford! will be office staff.

  The idea of love, a secret love, illicit love—it seemed quaint, precious. The small gemstone you’d found by the shore, of no actual value but flashy, like mica, slipped into a jacket pocket and fingered, held in the hand, secretly, from time to time—“For luck.”

  If someone asks, what do you have there, in your hand?—you open your hand to display, on the palm, the small gemstone of no value, and you say: “Just something I found by the river.”

  HIS WIFE IS UNWELL: he can’t leave her.

  His wife is emotionally fragile: he can’t leave her.

  His wife has cancer: he can’t leave her.

  He rehearses, his lips move silently. Any words that can be uttered are but mere words—easy to speak, but not so easy to retract.

  He doesn’t tell her any of this, exactly. But she seems to understand. She is upset. Then she tells him she won’t be emotional again. Won’t break down again. Won’t be weak. I promise.

  He has made her beg. He is shocked at himself, dismayed. He can’t forgive himself. But there is pleasure in it, very likely it will happen again.

  DELIRIOUS SMELL OF THE CALLA LILIES she’d brought to the room.

  Entering giddy and thrilled, more beautiful than he’d ever seen her, snow melting in her hair, in her eyelashes. Wanting to celebrate, feeling high, giddy and thrilled, for some sort of undisclosed good thing had happened in her life, family-life, work-life, she didn’t care to reveal laughing at the expression in his face as she came to him.

  TRYING TO BREAK THE SPELL, just a little.

  Trying to mitigate the feeling.

  Trying to see the woman apart from “love.” How another might see her, coolly assessing.

  Her clothes, her shoes. Tried to dislike her footwear. Boots, worn at the heel. Chic-stylish clothes from vintage clothing stores, always colorful, a clash of stripes, yet she seemed to calculate the effect, or usually.

  Eventually he discovered that she wasn’t a very careful or even clean person, for a woman. His fingernails might be finely ridged with dirt, truly it meant nothing, only that he’d been doing something involving some sort of dirt or oil, but her fingernails finely ridged with dirt looked wrong.

  Sometimes, he saw spots or stains in her clothing, that hadn’t come out in the wash or in dry cleaning.

  None of it mattered. That was the truth he discovered.

  He loved her, anything else was trivial.

  Wanting to tell her, assure her—If I am not begging you to leave your husband and marry me it is only because I know you would not—ever—do this. I know that I must not ask you because it would begin the break between us. I am remaining with my wife because my wife needs me, and because I love her, I will always love her though not as I love you.

  If my wife were to say to me, I don’t need you—go away; I would go away, at once. And I would beg you to come with me.

  THEY MADE LOVE AVIDLY. They made love less often, and so with an air of desperation. Each time they made love she thought—This is the final time. He is preparing me. They made love on top of the damp coverlet, or kicked it aside impatiently. They made love as he sat, bare-legged, naked, on that bed with his legs spread, upper thighs not so hard-muscled as he recalled, and she straddled him, determined, but whimpering, his hands cupping her small buttocks, that felt like a child’s; it was not a good feeling, it was a cruel sudden feeling; he felt he might injure her, so deeply thrusting into her, as into her belly, the soft moist vulnerable body of the exposed and vulnerable female. Oh! oh!—each outburst like a cry for help, it would be cruel to acknowledge.

  Love is what can’t be helped. When it waxes, and when it wanes.

  Love is what happens when you’ve been looking another way.

  Love is that sensation of something on the back of your neck, tell yourself it’s nothing, a strand of hair, at last you touch it and discover it’s an insect—you cast off with a curse.

  HE DID NOT SAY, finally—I can’t do this much longer. I don’t want to hurt you but—there are others I am not able to hurt who mean more to me than you do.

  IT WAS FIVE MONTHS, three weeks, six days from anniversary to anniversary. No formal good-bye, one afternoon she simply failed to show up at the place on Cartwright Street.

  He’d been desperate, badly upset. Thinking—Where is she! I’m so crazy for her.

  He called her cell phone, and she did not answer. Called her repeatedly. Called Fowler’s Publishing, and asked for her, and was told that she no longer worked there, she’d quit.

  “No longer works there? Are you sure?”

  What a question! Are you sure?

  He would call again, hoping to speak with another party, and hoping for another answer. Only afterward realizing that in so doing he’d spoken her name aloud for the first tim
e, to another person: “‘Juliane Deller.’”

  A faint smell of calla lilies in the room. Faint rancid-rotting smell, all but imperceptible.

  Like a bone that has been sprained, even broken, but beneath the skin, invisible inside the skin, the marriage healed, and was stronger. So he told himself, plausibly. Stronger.

  IN A WAKING DREAM he saw her: the lean, angular figure, swathed in purple. The movements of her limbs that were both awkward and graceful, of utter sincerity. Aloud he named: “‘Lamentations.’”

  All that day, he would recall the dream. Not its specific vision but the emotion it engendered in him of loss, grief, profound remorse.

  TELLING HIMSELF— She must have wanted it, too. For he’d never heard from her since.

  He’d tried to contact her, she had not once tried to contact him.

  He’d tried to remember their final meeting, which he hadn’t guessed was to be final. He wondered if she’d known, at the time. Or if, recollecting their conversation, in retrospect seeing something in his face he hadn’t known was there, she’d decided precipitously—That’s it. No more.

  He recalled their lovemaking, now from a little distance. Seeing, as if for the first time, the dimensions of the small room that had contained them, like a gemstone smoldering with radioactivity, in a sealed box.

  The oblong window, the wetted wood, damp coverlet on the bed, and a pattern in the coverlet like ferns. And those bits of broken, dried leaves that had blown into the corners of the room, sticking to the bare soles of their feet. The faint-rancid lily-smell.