Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In the loft I have a workbench of about six feet in length, that Jamie made for me. Jamie has stretched canvases for me and encouraged me to experiment with paints.

  Often, I gaze over the edge of the loft floor, at Jamie Stiles below. He’s a restless figure, burly, muscular, yet like an athlete he is agile on his feet, alert and curious. The sliding barn door to his studio is usually kept open except on cold days. He works with fire, sometimes. He works with spray paint. He has fashioned sculptures out of old broken floor lamps, discarded baby carriages, bullet-ridden STOP signs; scrap metal, fiberglass, window glass, aluminum and brass rods. I think that his work is not only strangely beautiful in its own way but “profound”—“important.” I don’t think that it’s naïve of Jamie Stiles to be thinking in terms of Rodin, not Harry Hansen of Whitefish Bay.

  Jamie has the ability to totally lose himself in his work. No matter how much he’s worried about, for instance, the financial upkeep of Heron Creek Farm, or the insanity of U.S. nuclear testing in the Southwest, or whether he will have an instructorship at WSU in the fall, his concentration on his work is complete as that of a lone child who has lost himself in play. He’s pitiless on himself when his work isn’t going well, which is fairly often; he’s stubborn, easily discouraged; it makes me sad that he sighs often, runs his fingers through his hair in a gesture of exasperation, or despondency; that he pulls at his beard, that seems to me a beautiful bristling beard, of the hue of mahogany, curlier than the hair on his head.

  Yet, so much of James Stiles seems beautiful to me! I could stare and stare at the man, even in his soiled bib-overalls worn without a shirt beneath, and his weatherworn sandals.

  When Jamie makes love to me he is awkward, tender, hesitant—he fears hurting me, or crushing me. And it is true that Jamie’s considerable weight takes the breath from me, and makes me worry that my ribs might crack. The fierce thrusts of his body cause me to shudder in pain, which Jamie interprets in another way. I never betray the slightest discomfort for I think only of Jamie. I think of my need to love, and to be loved.

  Never in my life before this have I loved any man—(I am sure)—yet by instinct I’ve known that I must not hurt Jamie’s feelings. The slightest tone of reproach or criticism of his work—never. I would never undermine Jamie Stiles’s sense of himself as a man, an artist or a sexual being.

  The truths I reveal to Jamie Stiles are those “truths” that will nurture Jamie’s love for me. For only Jamie Stiles’s love for me can validate the love I feel for him, so powerful it leaves me faint and breathless.

  It must be—I came so close to dying. Now, nothing matters except this life.

  SOME EVENINGS, we watch TV.

  On a sofa we sit holding hands. We are open about our affection for each other—(this is Jamie’s way, in the expression of affection generally)—and not at all embarrassed about seeming sentimental, even when “Captain Shalom” grunts wryly in our direction, passing with heavy steps through the living room on the way to his quarters at the rear of the house.

  We’re rarely alone watching TV. The prime hours are 8:00 P.M. and 9:00 P.M. Jamie laughs as loudly as the children laugh at the foolish pranks of Milton Berle, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz; Ozzie and Harriet are household favorites, as well as Arthur Godfrey, Lawrence Welk, and Phil Silvers. Jack Benny, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca require more thought, like Jack Paar, Truth or Consequences, and What’s My Line? Sometimes, Jamie falls asleep while watching TV, exhausted from a full day of work, and I don’t wake him, but continue to grip his hand tight. TV images wash over us. Our most torturous thoughts are obliterated in the bluish-flickering TV light.

  In our lumpy brass bed in Jamie’s longtime bedroom on the second floor of the house we lie entwined in each other’s arms. Here we talk, and kiss; we kiss, and make love; sometimes a sensation comes over me, that I am in the arms of someone else and not Jamie Stiles—someone whose name I have forgotten. I shudder with dread, but don’t cry out, and manage not to weep.

  For life is now. Life is not thinking, not reflective or backward-glancing; life is forward-plunging; life is the present moment as, on TV, it is always now.

  And I think—I am in the right place, at the right time.

  TO CELEBRATE OUR WEDDING in late October, Jamie’s poet-friend Hiram Brody gave a large, festive party for us in his Victorian house in the Faculty Hills neighborhood of Wainscotia Falls, and wrote a “sprung love sonnet” for the occasion. At the party, in addition to Jamie’s many friends, was a dazzling mix of writers, artists, sculptors, musicians, university professors, and their wives; here were such Wainscotia luminaries as Amos Stein, Myron Coughland, my former employer Morris Harrick, Carson Lockett III, and A. J. Axel—all of whom were friends of H. R. Brody’s and, I wanted to think, admirers of Jamie Stiles’s sculpture. (The most distinguished of these professors, judging by the deference paid to him, was Professor Axel of psychology, who made only a brief visit at the gathering, and left after the first champagne toast. Mr. Brody said proudly of his friend that A. J. Axel had just received the “largest federal government grant ever given to any research scientist in the State of Wisconsin” to help establish the Wainscotia Center for Social Engineering, of which Professor Axel is the founding director; the Center is to pioneer in the behavioral conditioning of anti-social, psychopathic, and subversive personalities.) To this gathering, white-haired Mr. Brody read his “sprung sonnet” in a richly dramatic voice; it was a poem containing an echo, he said, of a sonnet of Shakespeare’s—Let us not bar the twining of true love but celebrate Love’s fixed star . . . Everyone applauded loudly; Jamie wiped tears from his eyes. He didn’t understand most poetry, Jamie said, but he often cried just the same when he heard it.

  I thought Mr. Brody’s poem was strange, and beautiful. I did not quite understand it, either, but it brought tears to my eyes.

  Jamie and I had been married that morning by a justice of the peace at the Wainscotia Falls courthouse, with just a few witnesses from Heron Creek Farm. The fatherly justice had expressed surprise and a little concern that the bride seemed to have no family, or at any rate no family members who’d come to the wedding, but I smiled and assured him that Jamie Stiles was all the family I needed.

  (One of many kindnesses Ardis Steadman had done for me, in addition to boxing those possessions of mine which I’d left behind in Acrady Cottage, was to provide me with a birth certificate out of my university file, which I needed in order to be married. This birth certificate, with an ornate gilt seal from the State of New Jersey, was not a document I could remember having seen before; it stated that Mary Ellen Enright had been born in Pennsboro General Hospital, Pennsboro, New Jersey, on September 11, 1942, and that her parents were Constance Ann Enright and Harvey Sterns Enright. Were these my birth-parents? Or were these simply fictitious names someone had provided, for a birth certificate? The names meant nothing to me—not a stir of emotion. But I remembered Dr. Cosgrove speaking of New Jersey.)

  In black ink, with a fountain pen, H. R. Brody copied “Wisconsin Epithalamium” inscribed to Mary Ellen and Jamie, signed and dated in the poet’s flowing signature, on a stiff sheet of parchment paper, which Jamie has framed to hang in our bedroom. “It’s like having a handwritten poem by Robert Frost, or T. S. Eliot,” Jamie has said. He is deeply moved by the poem, as I am. Sometimes one of us reads it aloud to the other, as we prepare for bed.

  I thought—I have always loved this person. I have always known this person. Before I was born, I loved him.

  SHORTLY AFTER THIS, a strange and disturbing thing happens.

  I am not sure how to speak of it. So much in my life has floated beyond language, like a high scudding cloud so distant it can’t be identified, I have lost confidence in my ability to comprehend many things, let alone explain them.

  I have not tried to avoid “Captain Shalom” for I have not wanted to hurt the man’s feelings, nor do I want to hurt Jamie’s feelings; but there is something unnerving about Jamie’s ex-Marin
e uncle, that hasn’t only to do with the poor man’s ravaged face, his hairless battered head, and unblinking rheumy eyes; or his breath that smells of something metallic, like coins held hotly in the palm of a sweaty hand. In our household, in which there are so many individuals coming and going, in the kitchen, on the stairs, in the living room and hallways, not to mention in and out of bathrooms—(there are just two bathrooms for all of us, one on each floor; but there is an outhouse between the house and the hay barn, that Jamie says had been in use when he’d been a boy, not so long ago)—you are constantly encountering the same people yet you’re usually on your way elsewhere, hurrying past them with a murmured Excuse me!—or no words at all. The intimacy born of sheer proximity is a curious phenomenon—there is something mocking in it.

  Jamie’s middle-aged ex-Marine uncle uses crutches sometimes, though not always; often he can make his way upstairs by hauling himself hand over hand along the banister, and his method of descending stairs is a kind of free-falling plunge. The one thing you must not ever do is offer to assist him: this error, I made shortly after coming to live at Heron Creek Farm.

  The man had stared coldly at me. His eyes were fierce and glaring. Along the left side of his face was a zipper-like scar, and a portion of his upper lip was missing. His teeth were grayish, like the teeth of a malnourished child. His breath was coppery-hot. The ex-Marine who called himself Captain Shalom knew how to render me helpless, by not speaking as I stammered an apology.

  Finally he said in an ironic, gravelly voice, “When I need your help, ‘Mary Ellen,’ I will request it. Thanking you beforehand.”

  The way in which Captain Shalom pronounced Mary Ellen allowed me to know that he did not think much of the name, or the subterfuge which such a name can validate.

  Jamie has been concerned about his uncle’s “mental health” but—what can he do? Captain Shalom refuses to see any doctor, even local doctors; he flies into a fury at the suggestion that someone might drive him to Milwaukee, to see a VA doctor (that is, a psychiatrist). Jamie says that unless he overpowers his uncle and ties him up, and bundles him out to the pickup, it isn’t likely that anything can be done for the veteran.

  “Does he have a gun? Guns?”—this was my innocent query.

  “No firearms are allowed on this property. That is understood.”

  How was this a satisfactory answer? Jamie was incensed, that I should even suggest this.

  I think it’s likely that Captain Shalom keeps a gun, or guns, in his room. (This room, awkward for the disabled man to access, was his choice when he’d moved in, Jamie has explained.) But I think it’s likely that, if Captain Shalom feels the impulse to fire one of his guns, he would not kill any of us—(out of contempt, or indifference)—but only himself.

  For Captain Shalom is heroic, in his tortured way.

  I have tried to “sketch” him—though only by memory. I would like to take photographs of his face when he isn’t aware of me—but that isn’t likely.

  Captain Shalom is both jocular and despondent, by turns; his moods are not so very different from Jamie’s but more frequent, and unpredictable. By mid-afternoon he’s likely to be moderately drunk, which gives to his manner a playful, bitter-ironic air; as he is a wreck of a man, an object of pathos, he isn’t given to hypocrisy, if for instance someone tells him, as visitors to our house invariably do, meaning to be kind, that he is looking good he will say dryly, “Really? In whose eyes?—yours, or mine?”

  Or he will say nothing but grunt in a way to convey disgust, amusement, contempt; and lurch his way past, with the gleeful rudeness of the disabled for whom condescending kindnesses from the abled are particularly insulting.

  Between “Captain Shalom” and “Mary Ellen Enright” there is an uneasy sort of truce, I think. As I am Jamie Stiles’s wife, Jamie’s uncle believes that he should respect me; he’s dependent upon Jamie for a place to live and a household, for his own marriage ended shortly after he’d been discharged from the VA hospital in Milwaukee, and had returned to his wife and children in Racine with both physical and psychiatric problems. Yet, as I’m a young woman of only nineteen, an undergraduate at WSU, and, since coming to live at Heron Creek Farm, as Jamie Stiles’s dear companion, a fairly attractive young woman with a quick bright friendly smile, it is quite possible that Captain Shalom resents me, as men often resent women who are unattainable to them, as women. It is the case that when Captain Shalom and I are alone together in a room or in a hallway, we move past each other with averted eyes, and indrawn breaths. Captain Shalom is exceedingly polite with me at mealtimes, and often volunteers to help with kitchen cleanup, a chore Jamie mostly avoids with the excuse that he must return to his sculpting studio for an hour’s work or so before quitting for the day; at such times, I’m grateful if others in the household help out in the kitchen, for being alone with the ravaged and embittered ex-Marine is painful, and makes me very self-conscious.

  Here is a man who sees through you. Your happiness, your relentless smile, even your “love.”

  Yet, Captain Shalom is an obsessive reader, and has accumulated a library of secondhand books in his room; unlike the rest of us, he rarely watches TV, and never without snorting in derision and distaste. (Anything on TV that has to do with soldiers, armed forces, veterans, “war” he particularly scorns; but also pacifists, anti-war protesters, and SANE—to Jamie’s disappointment.) Often I see Captain Shalom limping outside with a book from his library, in good weather; he has found a place to read overlooking the pond, and has strung up a hammock there, for his own, private use. (Yet Captain Shalom has invited me to lie in the hammock any time I wish, an offer I would never take up for it seems to hold a veiled threat.) One warm afternoon when Captain Shalom went out to read in his hammock by the pond, I hurried upstairs to his room, to examine his books; though I knew that they were mostly historical books about war, as Jamie had told me. (I thought of searching for his guns, but could not so violate Jamie’s uncle’s privacy. I could not bring myself to look, for instance, through the man’s bureau drawers, or between the mattress and box springs of his bed.)

  Captain Shalom’s room was sparely furnished, with no carpet on the floorboards; there was a table, a single chair, a floor lamp that looked as if it had been salvaged from a junkyard. Surprisingly, the room was relatively neat, for Captain Shalom had made his bed as if he were in a barracks—tight-drawn, corners tucked in, the single pillow perfectly positioned. (I smiled to think how Jamie would never think of making any bed in which he’d slept. He kicks his covers off, leaves the bedclothes rumpled and churned-looking.) There was only one actual bookcase in the room, that stood about five feet high; but everywhere were books, some of them oversized picture or photography books, on the floor and table, on a windowsill. Hesitantly I pulled out a book from the bookcase, noting its place so that I could return it, and Captain Shalom would never know, but when I opened the heavy hardcover book I saw to my surprise that there were no words on the page—no printed words.

  I turned pages, and all were the same: blank.

  On the book’s spine there was nothing as well. On the book’s cover.

  Shaken, I replaced this book and opened another at random. And this book did have printed pages, but the print was blurred and incomprehensible as if it had melted; and a third book I opened, now quite frightened, and this too had pages that were incomprehensible to me, not like words in a foreign language but hieroglyphic-like words that did not use familiar letters. And the thought came to me, chilling yet somehow calm—That’s because you are dreaming. In a dream, you can never read print.

  Quickly I replaced the books, and quickly retreated downstairs to the first floor of the farmhouse. I have never returned to Captain Shalom’s room since.

  MY INJURIES WILL NEVER disappear entirely, I’ve been told—they are “neurological deficits.” Always I will be susceptible to migraine headaches. I can’t “play catch” as most others can in the household—playing with my little step-niece and my st
ep-nephew, for instance, is embarrassing, since I so often fumble the ball. In chill, damp weather, both my knees ache. My eyesight begins to fade at sundown. My eyes are weak, and water easily. A mild agitation will precipitate heart palpitations even when I am otherwise serene.

  And I still cry, for no evident reason.

  And Jamie comforts me at such times, without asking me what is wrong. And Rufus too, if he hears me.

  This afternoon, visitors are arriving. I think they are friends of Jamie’s from Madison—anti-nuclear activists, who are also artists. I have no idea how many people will be eating meals here for the next several days but I will have help in preparing these meals, and cleaning up in the kitchen afterward. Strangely, there is a kind of calm amid so many people, and commotion—and then, I can retreat to my loft in the hay barn anytime I wish, or nearly.

  Always room for one more at Heron Creek Farm—this is Jamie Stiles’s dictum.

  Anytime you are in the neighborhood of Heron Creek Farm, or anywhere in the vicinity of Wainscotia Falls, Wisconsin, you too are welcome to drop by here with all the others—of course.

  Please come! I would so like to meet you. Stay with us as long as you like.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Greg Johnson for reading this manuscript with his usual care, thoughtfulness, and sympathy; and for my husband Charlie Gross for his continued support.

  About the Author

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.