Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Though M.R. wished to kiss Kroll in turn—wished to kiss him avidly, and her arms tightening around him—yet she stiffened involuntarily, just perceptibly, as if someone had whispered to her: No!

  Kroll dropped his hands from M.R.’s shoulders and stepped back, frowning. It was a moment like stumbling in a dream—a misstep off a curb, or down a flight of stairs—and no turning back. M.R. heard herself stammering, “Oliver, I’m afraid—I should tell you . . .”

  “Tell me—what?”

  “I’ve liked—loved—our evenings together. Especially—lately. But I don’t want to mislead you, Oliver, I’m . . . there is. . . .”

  Coldly Kroll stared at M.R. He wasn’t going to make this easy for her. His face was darkening beet-red with resentful blood and the corners of his mouth tightened.

  “ . . . someone in my life. I mean, before I came here—there was someone. I really can’t claim”—M.R. was laughing, lifting her hands in a gesture of helplessness—“that this person is a serious, permanent part of my life, I mean from his perspective. But . . .”

  “But you are ‘involved’ with him—or is it her?”

  “ ‘Her’?” M.R. smiled uncertainly. “No—‘him.’ ”

  “ ‘Him.’ ” Kroll smirked.

  He would never forgive her, she knew.

  “You might have indicated this a little earlier, yes?”

  Kroll laughed mirthlessly. The spade-shaped beard seemed to bristle with hostility. He was very angry with her, M.R. saw. When she touched his wrist with her fingers, he thrust her away.

  “You might have indicated weeks ago. For instance—”

  M.R. was stunned. Kroll was itemizing events he’d taken her to, dinners, drives into the countryside—of course, how could she have failed to understand! How insensitive she’d been.

  “You allowed me to pay for your tickets each time we went out—and some of those tickets aren’t cheap. You allowed me to pay for most of our dinners. It may be that my salary at the University is higher than yours but you are entirely financially independent, you have no obvious dependents, while I—I have obligations.” Kroll’s voice trailed off, he’d begun to be embarrassed by the vehemence of his words.

  Obligations?—M.R. had no idea what Kroll meant. Another time she tried to touch Kroll’s arm and another time he rebuffed her. She said, faltering, “I—I’m so sorry. I’ve behaved unconscionably. I don’t know why—I think—I think that—this isn’t any sort of defense, just a clumsy explanation—that I thought you might be offended if I offered to pay—as I’d offered to pay the first time we went out. And a few other times—in fact I think I did pay—a few times. I’d thought—there are men who. . . .”

  “Well, yes—‘there are men who’—plenty of men who will pay for women for whom they have strong feelings, and who reciprocate those feelings. But our situation isn’t—wasn’t—that sort of situation, was it? And you knew this from the start.”

  “But I didn’t—I didn’t know— I mean, I didn’t—”

  She was a woman of thirty: hardly a girl. And she’d been involved with Andre Litovik for many years—at least, at a distance. Yet she knew little more of the ways of the world than a girl of fifteen might have known, when M.R. had been a girl of fifteen: she could not imagine herself as an active agent in a relationship with a man, only as passive. She had no ease with men; she could never gauge what a man might be thinking, or planning; in a conversation the man was likely to be dominant, but in the way in which a large vessel floats in water; you can guide the vessel by subtle movements of your hands even as the proprietor of the vessel believes that he is the one who is steering.

  Seeing that M.R. was so genuinely stricken with repentance, Kroll relented just slightly, like one withdrawing a dagger slowly, instead of twisting it. Coolly he said, “I wouldn’t have mentioned any of this except. . . . It’s God-damned annoying when. . . . Women make as much money as men, and yet . . . women expect men to pay for them. . . .”

  “But I—I did make dinner for you, Oliver—didn’t I? Several times?”

  “Dinner at home is something different. Of course you would make dinner for a friend and not expect to be paid for it, I hope.”

  M.R. saw that everything she said was misunderstood by this angry man buzzing and thrumming like a wasp. “Then—it’s hopeless. If I make dinner for you in this house, it’s only what’s expected. When you take me out, I should pay for my own meal.”

  She stammered in confusion and hurt. She had not experienced such hostility as an adult, even when Andre had spoken harshly to her; she had no defense against what she perceived to be sheer dislike, repugnance.

  Meanly Kroll persisted, like a pit bull that has closed its teeth around something living and must shake, shake, shake it to death: “And you never offer to drive. You could drive—but you take it for granted, I will drive. My car is no more suited for—for driving—than yours.” Kroll’s face was beet-red in indignation, he seemed scarcely to know what he was saying. Such loathing of her, she’d never guessed at, in the man’s eyes!

  Yet Kroll continued, with the air of one who has been grievously mistreated. His manner was professorial, even lawyerly—he was drawing up a devastating brief against her, who had so wounded him. For now it developed that, on one of their recent evenings, Kroll had scraped the right rear fender of his Jaguar, backing out of a tight parking space—this, too, was a grievance lodged against M.R. who listened stunned, baffled; she’d never known any man who expected a woman to drive a vehicle instead of him—except on long journeys perhaps; her father had always driven when he and her mother were together; no adult male in Carthage, in M.R.’s memory, would have wished to surrender a steering wheel to any woman—this would have signaled incapacity, illness. And Andre Litovik, of course, would not have allowed anyone else to drive any vehicle in which he was a passenger, certainly not a woman.

  Faintly M.R. protested: “I can only say—I didn’t know. I am so very sorry. You’d seemed to enjoy—your beautiful car. Maybe you should have suggested. . . .”

  “I did. More than once.”

  “You did—?”

  M.R. was sure that Kroll had not made any such suggestion. Most evenings Kroll drove to M.R.’s house to pick her up; occasionally, it was more convenient for M.R. to drive to Kroll’s house, after her day at the University, or to meet him in town. When M.R. drove to meet Kroll she was often late—some strange spell overtook her, slowing her as if a narcotic had entered her veins; she who was compulsively early for most engagements, found herself leaving at the last possible minute to meet Kroll, or after the last minute.

  Oliver Kroll was somewhat vain of the sporty cobalt-blue Jaguar and certainly wouldn’t have wanted to drive anywhere in M.R.’s very ordinary American compact car with the ridiculous name “Saturn”—(ridiculous to Kroll who teased M.R. about the fact that M.R. hadn’t been able to identify the brand name of her own car, she’d hurriedly purchased as “pre-owned” several years before)—still less would he have consented to allow M.R. to drive the Jaguar. Yet this new grievance was deeply wounding to him, as extreme as the first grievance and a confirmation of it.

  As Kroll raged M.R. tried to compute: how much did she owe this angry man? For certainly she owed Oliver Kroll something, she saw that now; she’d failed to behave equitably with him, she’d behaved shamefully and obliviously. . . . Kroll lived several miles from M.R.’s little house on Echo Lake: three miles, each way? Multiplied—how many times? (How many times had they gone out together? M.R. could not think.) Gasoline, wear and tear on the Jaguar, Kroll’s valuable time spent driving? M.R. was hot with shame, seeing such loathing in the face of a man she’d imagined had cared for her.

  Loved her! What a farce.

  M.R. excused herself and hurried to another room to locate her checkbook in a desk drawer for—how much?—what was a reasonable sum?—her head felt as if it were ins
ide a clanging bell. . . . Seeing then that the name she’d written in haste was misspelled she began another check, made out not to Krull but Kroll; she feared insulting Kroll but very likely by this time the man was beyond being insulted by M.R.: he loathed her, he wanted his money from her! Naïvely M.R. was hoping that some tattered remnant of their relationship might be salved if M.R. could manage to behave as a man might, reasonably and without an excess of emotion.

  She returned to Kroll, with the check. Kroll was standing in front of the Reynolds portrait, staring without seeming to see it; his face was still very red. Profusely M.R. apologized. “Oliver, I’m so sorry! I hope you can forgive me. I hope you won’t think ill of me. I’m just—I was just—I think I am just”—wanting to say naïve but correcting herself, seeing Kroll’s look of contempt—“stupid. Unthinking.”

  M.R. held out the check to him. She saw that Kroll wanted to take the check even as he was insulted by the offer—for of course Kroll wished to maintain the dignity of a gentleman for whom such grubby issues are trivial even as he wanted the woman to abase herself before him, to explain and apologize and repay him. He took the check from her, frowning—“This is too much.”

  She’d made out the check for $350. She’d calculated that she might owe Kroll half that amount, and giving him $350 allowed a margin of error.

  “Please, Oliver. Just take it.”

  She tried to speak calmly. She was feeling sick, as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. With the look as of one confronted by a bad odor Kroll folded the check and shoved it into his coat pocket as if he were doing M.R. a favor.

  “Well. Let’s eat.”

  M.R. could not believe these words. Eat? Kroll wanted her to serve dinner to him after all this, that he might eat?

  He was making an effort to smile. His eyes were narrowed, wary. He had no clear idea how far he’d gone—what he had said, that might be irrevocable.

  “I don’t think so, Oliver. After—this—I’m not hungry. I don’t feel well. I think that you should leave.”

  “Leave? Now that we’ve straightened this out?”

  Kroll seemed genuinely surprised. He had looked at her as if he loathed her, he had drawn up his case brilliantly and irrevocably against her, and now he expected to behave as if nothing had passed between them?

  M.R. said: “Yes. I think you should leave.”

  Now a deeper woundedness seeped into Kroll’s face. Now his mouth worked inside the spade-shaped beard, in fury. M.R. backed away from him. She was frightened of him. He might explode at any moment, he might lay his hands on her. . . .

  She meant to move past him, into another room, but Kroll blocked her way. His face was livid with dislike. But if he hated her—why didn’t he leave?

  “I think, Oliver, you had better leave. I’ve repaid you, I hope. If it isn’t enough, please let me know—I will be happy to pay you more.”

  She was desperate now to be rid of him. The fury in the man’s face was terrifying.

  It may have been a mistake to turn her back on Kroll—M.R. ran to open the front door and he gripped her shoulder, her arm—with a little cry of surprise and pain, she wrenched away—“Please. Please leave. I want to be alone.” She was close to fainting, she dared not allow Kroll to see how agitated he had made her, how weakened.

  He gripped her again—her arm, her wrist. And again M.R. pulled away.

  Kroll tried to smile—protesting he’d only just arrived—he’d had something to tell her and he’d told her—he didn’t want to leave, just yet—but M.R. was unable to look at him, only wanting him gone.

  “Please. Please leave.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake, Meredith.”

  But he was very angry, his voice quavered. M.R. could feel how he would have liked to take hold of her, and shake-shake-shake her into submission.

  Such shame—she’d so miscalculated the man’s feelings for her—she had thought he’d cared for her—and in an instant, all that had vanished. He might have taken a knife to the portrait-poster on the wall, slashing beautiful Jane, Countess of Harrington, to shreds.

  Indignant Kroll stepped outside. The check was in his hand again—M.R. saw that his hand shook. She thought He will tear it into shreds, he will scatter them on the walk.

  Instead, Kroll returned the check to his pocket. Without a backward glance he made his way to the curb and to the low-slung car with the scratched right-rear fender that required you to bend, to bow as you climbed into it, and M.R. watched through a window not daring to breathe as the car jerked from the curb, and away.

  Like a drunken woman M.R. made her way into her bedroom and fell onto the bed where she lay sick, sickened in her soul for hours through the long night too shocked to fully comprehend what had happened: how the man had revealed himself to her, his dislike of her, his fury.

  A phone rang, rang—she pressed her hands over her ears.

  If he returned! If he made his way into the house!

  Not out of love for her—but out of wounded pride. He would revenge himself upon her, if he could.

  Her shoulder ached where he’d gripped her, her arm would bruise from his hard angry fingers. It was shame more than fear, that paralyzed her. Black brackish water gathered at the back of her mouth. She was in terror of being violently sick, choking on her vomit and so they would find her as they’d found the elderly woman in Carthage, partly decomposed, rancid with decay, alone.

  Scarcely breathing for her ribs had been broken and the mud-muck stinking in her nostrils, in her mouth, the very lashes of her eyes stuck together.

  Die why don’t you. Mudgirl, garbage-girl—die.

  In time she would think almost calmly, wryly—he wasn’t the first man to break her heart.

  He wasn’t the crucial man to break her heart.

  He was a man in her life. Not the man.

  “Meredith!”

  She called him as he’d requested on this evening in March 2003, he’d answered on the first ring.

  There was an unnerving intimacy in the man’s voice, after so many years—“Meredith! Thanks for calling.”

  Asking if he could come to see her, he had something urgent to tell her. M.R. hesitated a moment—it was a perceptible moment, Oliver Kroll would register it—before saying yes.

  “Yes of course.”

  It was news of Alexander Stirk, and could not be good news.

  And so Oliver Kroll came to the president’s house, at midnight. This interminable day, that had begun long ago in a kind of innocence! M.R. opened the front door for him, before he rang the bell. The old intimacy between them was such, neither could quite bear to shake the other’s hand.

  An observer, watching, would conclude from this—there was a mysterious bond between them.

  “Strange to be here. At this hour.”

  Kroll might have added And alone.

  For very few people came to the president’s house individually. It was not the sort of residence—it had not the sort of atmosphere—to which individuals came, as friends. Oliver Kroll had in fact been a guest at Charters House more than once since M.R. had become president of the University, but always in the company of others: formal receptions, dinners for distinguished speakers.

  Amid this company of others, he and M.R. were obliged to acknowledge each other only formally, politely.

  She had never been able to forget that look of hatred in the man’s face. That loathing for the woman, as she saw it. In Oliver Kroll’s TV personality, the dry, droll, sarcastic wit, the caustic asides and sneering twist of his lips, the dismissive of liberal, “left-wing” as contemptible, if not traitorous—she felt it yet more powerfully, and she could not bear it.

  Tonight, Kroll looked older, strained—the jaunty public manner was subdued. His beard was still trimmed to resemble a sharp-edged spade but it was threaded now with gray and there were b
umps and shallows in the hairless scalp. M.R. wondered—was this the man who’d so intimidated her?—frightened her? At the University, Oliver Kroll was one of the enemy—a cadre of highly vocal conservative faculty members who voted in a block at meetings, in opposition to many of M. R. Neukirchen’s proposals. These faculty members were all male—all “white”—they were all above the rank of assistant professor. (Not that it mattered greatly—the liberal faculty at the University so outnumbered the conservatives in matters of voting.) M.R. was inclined to believe that, if Kroll hadn’t encouraged the undergraduate Stirk to tape their conversation, one of his conservative colleagues had.

  In the decade since Kroll had departed M.R.’s life, he’d become a yet more controversial campus figure. Since the advent of the George W. Bush administration and the triumph of conservative politics in America, Kroll had joined his older colleague/mentor G. Leddy Heidemann as a White House consultant. Where Heidemann was noted in the press as the Middle East adviser to the secretary of defense—the “architect”/“moral conscience” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—Kroll’s influence was domestic, and more general. As a political theorist Oliver Kroll was frequently invited to appear on television—Sunday morning news commentary, CNN and Fox News. In the hectic days following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in the fall of 2001, both Kroll and Heidemann had appeared frequently on television. And now in March 2003 on the eve of the invasion of Iraq the pro-war propaganda had escalated—This is a crusade. This is not “diplomacy by other means.” The time for diplomacy is past. There can be no “diplomacy” with evil.

  Rarely did M.R. watch these political discussion programs, they so upset her. And hearing her University colleagues say such things—warmongering, pseudo-“patriotic,” shameful—she hurriedly switched off the TV.

  As a successor to Heidemann, Oliver Kroll became faculty adviser for the local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom. He campaigned for funds to bring to the campus controversial conservative speakers and activists; at a teach-in on the subject of potential war in the Middle East, organized by liberal faculty members, Kroll had led the opposition of conservative professors and students who’d picketed the event and asked heckling questions of the speakers. Since October, when the U.S. Congress had voted by a considerable majority to authorize the president to use “military force” against Iraq, there had come to be an increasingly fevered and divisive political atmosphere on campus, as throughout the country. As president of this distinguished university M.R. could not become involved in political arguments, which were often embittered, angry and intolerant; she’d stayed away from the teach-in, and wrote an editorial for the campus newspaper pleading for civility. It had been told to her—she’d been warned, by Leonard Lockhardt—that an educator of her stature was required to be above the “fracas.” There were conservative members of the University’s board of trustees and there were—of course—numerous conservative donors, who tracked the record of the University president in the media, closely. Even in small gatherings M.R. had learned to be reticent about her personal feelings—her predilection for liberal causes, on principle; she dared not joke, and she avoided all occasions for irony, which were occasions for ambiguity. Quickly she’d learned that a public position puts one in hostage: the first freedom you surrender is the freedom to speak impulsively, from the heart.