Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  So he’d remained behind! M.R. had suspected so, though her heart was beating as quickly as if she’d been taken by surprise.

  “ ‘M.R.’! I’ve always wondered if the initials were meant to suggest—inadvertently of course—‘Mr.’—‘mister.’ An awkward—unconvincing—sort of cross-dressing, eh?”

  He was taunting her. He was laughing at her. In his laughter such contempt and such wish to harm M.R. felt light-headed, faint—the blunder she’d made.

  Sprawled in one of the old leather chairs in the library where lamplight cast a flickering glow upon shining brass surfaces, the prim glass fronts of bookshelves and latticed windows made opaque by night. Heidemann was buffalo-shouldered, massive and sunken in the torso, with a large blunt head and features that, dim-lit, resembled fissures in rock. But no rock-ore so alive, threatening.

  M.R. felt a rush of shame. Purely shame! For she was barefoot, and disheveled; and had probably been talking or murmuring to herself, chastising herself, as she’d begun to do frequently, when she was alone.

  “Mr. Heidemann—I think you should leave. Please.”

  “ ‘Mister’! But you are ‘mister’—I thought we’d settled that.”

  When M.R. stared at him in dismay Heidemann laughed, a sound as of foil being shaken, mirthless but percussive.

  “We’ve never really talked, you know—‘M.R.’ Even when you’ve invited intimate friends of mine—like Oliver Kroll—to Charters House, you have conspicuously not invited G. Leddy Heidemann.”

  “I think—please—you should leave. It’s late. . . .”

  M.R.’s voice shook like leaves rattling on a tree—desiccated leaves, a late-autumn tree.

  Slowly—belligerently—Heidemann heaved himself to his feet. He, too, was disheveled, in rumpled-looking trousers, a mismatched sport coat. He was breathing audibly, he smelled of whiskey. M.R. was surprised at the bitter reproach in his voice and wondered if he were speaking truthfully.

  “I could never—in all conscience—invite to Charters House an individual who promulgates war—against a non-aggressive nation in the Middle East—as a ‘preemptive strike.’ Or one who aligns himself with ‘Holocaust deniers’—to be controversial, to gain attention.”

  Heidemann stared at M.R., as if he hadn’t expected such a response.

  But M.R.’s speech left her weakened, faint—like a boxer with but one powerful blow, exhausted now in the effort of that blow.

  She had insulted him—had she? Now Heidemann lurched toward her, to frighten her—and M.R. shrank back, instinctively. Her skin crawled with the horror of memory—the mocking query Did you think that you could escape—this?

  The man would hurt her, she saw. He would humiliate her physically. He was fearless in the confidence that M.R. would never report him—would never dare risk such exposure, such ugly publicity for the University.

  “No! Please . . .”

  “ ‘Please’—what? Take pity on you?”

  Heidemann was vastly amused. But he was angry, too. And he’d been drinking.

  M.R. turned to run from the library and somehow the heavyset man was close behind her, seizing her in his arms—his Buddha-belly pressing against her back. She could smell the whiskey on his breath and she could smell his body. Hands crude as welders’ gloves closed over her breasts, squeezing—“What a sorry specimen of a woman! You have failed even at that.”

  M.R. winced with pain. She opened her mouth to scream but could not scream. The man’s fingers were tightening, horribly. It was as if he wanted to destroy her, obliterate her; it wasn’t enough just to hurt her, or to humiliate her. She would have fallen to the floor except he held her erect, mocking—“You knew that I’d remained behind. You were fully aware, inviting me into your house. After what you did to that poor boy, Stirk—one of my students—you who have no children of your own! You deserve to be punished.”

  In desperation M.R. thought If he hurts me, maybe it will be over. He will release me. She would have pleaded with the man except words of abnegation stuck in her throat and instead, unable to help herself, instinctively she resisted the man, and it was his maleness she outraged, fatally.

  Though he outweighed her by eighty pounds and was very strong M.R. wrenched herself free of his grip and was running—barefoot, panicked. He had stepped—stomped—on her bare feet, and hurt her, yet she was able to run, limping—as behind her the man stared after her, swaying on his feet; then, he lumbered after her, cursing her. M.R. found herself at the rear of the house, in the darkened kitchen area—in the butler’s pantry—barely she was able to see the basement door, ajar—quickly she ran to it, and descended the steps in the dark. Thinking He will never follow me here. I will escape him here.

  Beneath cellar stairs long ago she’d hidden. Crouched and curled like a stepped-on little worm amid cobwebs and dustballs.

  They had not found her then—had they?

  But the man—Heidemann—was not to be deflected. In a whiskey-rage plunging into the dark, thunderous on the stairs, groping for a light—which by chance he switched on—seeing M.R. crouched at the foot of the stairs, white-faced and terrified, panting—almost you’d have thought the woman stripped naked, so vulnerable she seemed, hair in her face.

  He cursed, and laughed, and descended the stairs to her. But clumsily, on legs that seemed bloated, and the bloated torso veering, so the man lost his balance on the narrow stairs, and fell—as M.R. lifted something, an object she’d grabbed with which to protect herself, a rod of some kind, about three feet in length and made of iron—desperately swinging as the man plunged forward, and down; and whether the iron rod struck his head a fatal blow cracking the skull, or whether, as he fell heavily, his head struck the sharp edge of a step, he shuddered and lay very still partway on the stairs and partway on the cellar floor where an inky liquid began to trickle from a head wound.

  M.R. crouched beside him. The large body damp with sweat, the large head with its thinning hair and despoiled scalp, a distressingly shallow breath, the small eyes part-closed and unseeing. She was pleading with him—“No! Get up! You can’t be hurt!” She understood that Heidemann was crafty and might be playing a trick—she would not have been surprised, if the man had come to Charters House wired.

  “No. Get up. Wake up. . . .”

  M.R. dared to touch Heidemann’s shoulder. She shook his shoulder. She could feel the man sinking, drifting from her—she thought He will blame me. He will accuse me.

  In desperation M.R. stumbled back upstairs. In the dim-lit kitchen she groped for the telephone, which was a wall phone—with panicked fingers she punched the numerals 911. But there was no ring—there appeared to be no dial tone. M.R. broke the connection, and tried again—and again there was no ring. Heidemann had yanked the phone out of the socket as he’d lurched past—had he?

  M.R. listened—had she heard a cry? A man’s cry, from the basement?

  Except for blood pulsing in her ears, nothing. She thought There is no one there!

  For it seemed to her utterly impossible, that one of her university colleagues had pursued her on the cellar steps, fallen and injured his head—this lurid incident had to be a dream, another of her dreams, for ever more frequently she was mired in dreams of surpassing ugliness like one mired in mud; her deeper, most inward life had become a concatenation of random and humiliating dreams that left her exhausted and broken. But she would not give in.

  Almost eagerly she returned to the basement. And there, to her horror, at the foot of the stairs the massive fallen body of the man lay unmoving and now no longer breathing—no longer shuddering and twitching. A putrid smell lifted from the body as if it had already begun to decay, in mockery and spite of her.

  “Wake up! You can’t be serious! This isn’t . . . funny. . . .”

  By this time, the wounded head was covered in blood like tentacles. The face was part-collapsed like a mask
that has come away from a face.

  Gravity pulled at the heavy jowls, the loose rubbery lips that even now in death were jeering, lascivious.

  “Please! Let me help you . . . sit up . . .”

  M.R. was terrified of getting too close to Heidemann, of his grabbing her—a wrist, an ankle. She believed that his eyelids were fluttering—he was observing her every move. Her breasts throbbed with pain and with the insult of pain, the man’s fingers squeezing squeezing squeezing as if wishing to squeeze the life out of her—what was most offensive in her, the female. She could not bear his assaulting her again, her stupidity in coming too close to her enemy.

  But he’d ceased breathing. He had no pulse—that she could find with her groping fingers.

  Long ago as one of the good-schoolgirls at Carthage High, Meredith—“Merry”—had taken an extracurricular course in emergency medical care and “life-saving”; she knew, she must try to restart the unconscious man’s breathing, by placing her mouth against his—pushing against his chest; she must try to restart his wicked heart, that had to be a fat, discolored muscle the size of a large brute fist; or, more sensibly, she must run for help, from the house—she must summon help for the stricken man, if she could not herself provide it.

  But she could not move, she was paralyzed with revulsion for him, and the utter horror of what had happened. She thought He has destroyed me. This was his intention.

  Like one staring at newsreel footage of a long-ago catastrophe in which all participants are now dead M.R. saw in her mind’s addled eye not only the devastation of her career but of her life—what minimal life she’d harbored for herself—and for all hope of a life beyond that minimal life. Most painful was the knowledge it was not the hateful man who had destroyed her but M.R. who had destroyed herself.

  And then, she had no choice. It was necessity acting through her like electric current jolting her limbs.

  The lifeless body heavy as a sack of concrete she dragged gripping the ankles into the dank-smelling interior of the basement and to the ancient corroded sink that had not been used in decades. Overhead the light—from bare lightbulbs—was faint as a distant galaxy. And so she could not see clearly the collapsed flesh-face except to sense its jeering and in the part-open eyes, a look of contempt that was the more terrible for its being an intelligent and discerning and not mere brutal contempt. She feared—she was awaiting—the man’s derisive laughter that had somehow translated itself into—she knew this, as clearly as if he’d boasted to her—a powerful stink of urine, feces, decay.

  She was not a weak woman but oh!—she could not stop herself from gagging, vomiting. The spasm wracked her like a creature inside her frantic to escape and no escape except through her throat, her gasping mouth.

  Then, the spasm passed. Her mouth reeked of vomit like acid, she dared not swallow to make herself sicker but spat, and spat, and wiped at her mouth, and spat again.

  Oh!—she was so very sick, and so appalled and terrified. Yet she understood what she must do for she had no choice.

  Always it was claimed of her, she was strong, and she was capable. You are not loved for being strong and capable if you are a female but if you are a female and you are strong and capable you will make your way without love. Even so, some of her strength had drained from her in recent weeks and in these recent hours and so it was the memory of her strength that allowed her to act as she had no choice but to act for survival demands strength where weakness is death. For what is courage but desperation. What is the indomitable but desperation. What is success, triumph, but desperation. Yet what difficulty for her to lift the lifeless body heavy as a sack of concrete into the ancient sink—for long crazed minutes she struggled trying first to lift the legs, and then the shoulders and head; giving up on the torso and then again repositioning the bloated legs that flailed about with a kind of spiteful playfulness; to make the legs less heavy, and her task less cumbersome, she thought to remove the shoes—unlacing shoes on the feet of a dead man is not easy!—tugging off the shoes of any other is not easy but how much more difficult, the shoes of the dead—this was an insight M.R. had not yet had in her lifetime, till now. And thinking of her astronomer-lover who’d requested of her several times to remove his shoes—or, rather, hiking boots—for he was too lazy to remove them himself he’d said—(jokingly)—(she’d guessed that in fact Andre’s back had been hurting, he could not easily stoop over but did not want to confess such a weakness to the much-younger and -fitter girl who adored him)—there was pleasure in the intimacy of the gesture, and playfulness; and now, removing her enemy’s shoes, there was only disgust, dismay. And horror.

  Yet, the decision was a good one. For now she had less difficulty lifting the bloated legs, the thighs enormous as hams, the fatty lower part of the body she struggled to balance on the rim of the sink as she struggled then to lift the torso that seemed both bloated and sunken, and the arms that flailed about as in the rudiments of a mock embrace, and then the head—the head!—that lolled on the shoulders in a way to suggest languidness, even flirtatiousness.

  What intimacy in the transaction! Like secret lovers bound together, irrevocably.

  At last, the body was in the sink. Very awkwardly, fatly crumpled in upon itself, and the heavy head yet uplifted—fallen back upon the shoulders—so that he might observe her through his near-shut eyes, in all her misery. It was as if she stood naked before him, exposed to his judgment. A thrill of mirth rippled through him. A slack-jawed grin played about the lips.

  She waited, but he did not speak. She was certain that he was observing her, however.

  She had never seen a dead body before. Except the body of Mudgirl, perhaps. And that had been a small broken child’s body of little consequence and not the body of an adult, acclaimed man.

  She was very tired from dragging the body, lifting the body into the sink. Her arms, neck and back ached from the strain. And all that lay ahead—she felt a frisson of pure horror.

  Her bare, pale feet were splattered with blood. The front of her clothing was smeared. Beneath her nails, she knew there must be more blood.

  She would have to clean herself thoroughly, afterward.

  “I will do it.”

  She returned upstairs to the kitchen where a single light burned overhead. Except for the dangling phone which she replaced immediately there was nothing to suggest the desperation of a few minutes before—nothing out of place.

  She returned to the library where lamplight cast a warm romantic glow upon polished surfaces—mahogany, glass. She saw that the leather chair in which the heavyset man had sprawled was out of place and she repositioned the chair and glanced about seeing nothing else that would catch the eye of the housekeeper Mildred. She switched off the lights and retreated.

  In the living room, too, lights were burning—there were several chairs pulled out of place, in which her uninvited guests had sat, to form a casual half-circle. These chairs she repositioned, as precisely as she could remember. She switched off the lights and retreated.

  In the morning Mildred would discover nothing out of place.

  “But I have not much time.”

  Beneath the kitchen sink on a shelf were several pairs of latex gloves of which she took one pair.

  A pair of shears, out of a kitchen drawer; several of the large, razor-sharp chef’s knives on a magnetized rack overhead. These she appropriated as if she’d known beforehand what she would do with them.

  In a storage room adjacent to the kitchen were supplies—black plastic trash bags of which she took as many as a dozen.

  In the garage attached to the house, that had been converted from a carriage-house decades before, she found a handsaw amid a wide selection of tools in a workman’s bench.

  She found another cache of trash bags larger than the kitchen bags.

  It was 12:29 A.M. She would have to move quickly.

  Returning t
hen to the basement and to the laundry room where in the antique corroded sink the body lay in its clumsy posture. She wasn’t sure that the body had not moved in her absence—she couldn’t be sure if the cold shrewd eyes had blinked. But the loose jeering grin remained, and the backward angle of the head as if vertebrae at the top of the spine had broken.

  With the shears she removed the man’s clothing. And now it was a part-clothed body, and by degrees a naked body—flaccid, dense with wiry hairs, splotched and spotted and pitted and foul-smelling. The hot flesh had begun to cool, the surface of the skin was slick with oily sweat. The terror of the brute physical life was embodied here, she could not judge the man harshly who’d had to dwell in this body, though reasoning that he’d been young, once—a child, once. Some profound disappointment in life had wounded him deeply, he’d been sickened by the infection and had not recovered. She felt pity for him, in that instant—bile had consumed him from within.

  Hatred was in the man stopped-up like pus. It was not personal, that this hatred had spilled over onto her.

  It is not a personal thing, that a man will loathe a woman.

  The genitals were swollen. The penis was of the shape and size of a slug.

  What sorrow in the body! Almost, she could not hate him.

  Then, she remembered the Iraqi war, and the “pre-emptive” crusade against imagined enemies, and the links to Holocaust-denial Web sites—the fact that G. Leddy Heidemann had conspired to commit war crimes, or to aid and abet others in the commission of war crimes. He had lent his name to the vicious enterprise of war in the Middle East and the killing and maiming of civilians and by his association he had tainted the University. And he’d said cruel, critical things about M. R. Neukirchen in the very first weeks of her presidency, from which passages had been reprinted in the campus newspaper. . . . That, M.R. had vowed to forget but could not forgive.

  “ ‘Disarticulate.’ ”

  It had never been more than an arcane term to her.

  She tugged on the latex gloves that were already stained. Like a surgeon—rather, like a pathologist—she took up the handsaw, shakily at first, but by degrees with more strength, sawing through the man’s thick wrists, ankles. What a shock it was, to strike bone! She had to find a way through bones, at their joints. This was the secret of disarticulation. After much effort she managed to detach both the hands, and both the feet. Next, she sawed through elbow joints: the long arms had to be halved. The basement of Charters House was chill as the deep interior of a well yet her face was covered in sweat by this time and rivulets of sweat ran down her chest and back inside her clothes.