Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And perhaps it was insulting to her simply as a woman, as a wife, as one who’d been impregnated by the man and bore his children, that Victor was infatuated with any girl, mooning over her like a lovestruck puppy while Elinor stood before him trying to make conversation like an adult. Trying not to notice how distracted the husband was, clearly impatient to escape the house, before even the children left for school. Always he was saying, avoiding the wife’s eye: “Don’t wait up for me tonight. Please.”

  And the husband’s ridiculous humming. In the shower especially. Like a hive of bees gone berserk.

  “There is no girl. You are confused. You’re looking feverish, Eli. Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  This was gaslighting. Elinor knew. She’d plied the technique herself more than once.

  Had he forgotten, Elinor had already seen a doctor? Doctors? Who’d prescribed medication to calm her nerves, stir her cognitive abilities, allow her to sleep past dawn, quell suicidal thoughts. Make her feel good about herself again.

  She’d tried diet pills also. For years. Prescription and over-the-counter. Might’ve worked if she’d mainlined amphetamine directly into her carotid artery, otherwise no. The more jumpy, edgy, depressed and angry, the more the raging appetite, like a fire into which someone has tossed kerosene.

  She’d considered, then decided against, using some of her own medications in preparing the lethal tea. But the long-legged girl belonged to Victor exclusively.

  Pulverizing pills and capsules, and a droplet of Deet. Who would know?

  None of the previous girls had called the house, so far as Elinor knew. It had been a radical, bold step, the dancer who’d choreographed “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” under Professor Stockman’s direction—the long-legged girl herself!—had dared to call and leave a message asking if she might drop by to leave Professor Stockman a token of her esteem and gratitude.

  Not wanting to bring the gift to the professor’s office. Not wanting to give it to him in person. Just—Thought I’d leave it for the Professor. And you could give it to him after graduation—after I’m gone …

  Elinor had listened in astonishment. The nerve of this girl! A flimsy excuse for her wanting to come to Victor’s house, to see where he lived; to flaunt her youth, beauty, poise in the very face of the betrayed wife …

  It was intolerable, a devastating insult, and yet the wife called the number the girl had left, to set a date. Feeling the cunning of a hunter when through some confusion, misunderstanding or plain accident his heedless prey is approaching him.

  And so in the kitchen of the big wood frame house on Hope Street the wife is trembling with excitement, apprehension. Staring at the old, dented teakettle on the stove beginning to whistle a plaintive upbeat tune: first the vibratory hum rising sharply, then the pent-up breath before the actual whistle penetrating Elinor’s eardrums.

  Doorbell. Already five-thirty P.M.? Five thirty-five?

  She’d meant to answer the door herself but Isabel has gotten there first which is just as well (the wife thinks) for seeing the thirteen-year-old daughter, taking in the fact that Elinor appears to be a normal wife-and-mother, the long-legged girl is even less likely to be suspicious of her invitation to tea.

  “Mrs. Stockman! How do you do …”

  The query is polite, forthright. Clear-blue-eyed. Here is a very poised and self-confident young woman, and tall.

  “How do I do. ‘Well,’ I guess. Though not exactly ‘very well’—that would be excessive.”

  Elinor laughs, as one might laugh standing on the tilting deck of a ship in a windstorm. She sees the girl blink at her quizzically as her own children often blink at her when she says something witty with a deadpan expression.

  Gaiety in the professor’s wife’s laughter, and something like a shark-flitting shadow beneath.

  “Come this way, dear. Please …”

  “My name is Stacy, Mrs. Stockman. You know—Stacy Donovan. We met after the dance recital …”

  “Did we? I don’t think so, dear. I’d remember, if we had.”

  Calling the girl dear. Best to deceive, disarm. And smile, smile. The witch inviting Gretel inside the gingerbread house, quick shut the door.

  Good that the husband is away. For once the wife is damned happy that the husband will be away for hours.

  How pleasant the professor’s wife is to her long-legged silver-blond patrician visitor. Pebbles wouldn’t melt in the woman’s scrubbed-looking resolutely un-made-up mouth.

  Probably, the wife thinks, she is no older than the girl’s mother. Yet, the wife doesn’t doubt that she looks much older than the girl’s mother in the girl’s eyes.

  “In here, dear. You will stay for a few minutes, I hope …”

  In her arms against her flat chest the girl is carrying a tinselly gift tote bag containing something fairly sizable and heavy, probably expensive. The wife recalculates—certainly expensive.

  Possibly, the girl would like to leave the gift and escape. Possibly, she is somewhat nervous, not quite so self-confident as the wife has imagined.

  “… don’t want to take up your time, Mrs. Stockman …”

  Not at all! Not at all. The wife insists, she has been looking forward to the visit. The wife was so impressed with that “remarkable, original” dance thesis based on the Melville story.

  (This is true. The wife was indeed impressed with the dance adaptation, and bitterly jealous of the long-legged dancer.)

  Away from the front door of the house, away from the hall where there is the danger of family traffic, the wife and the long-legged girl find themselves in a little parlor where “tea things” have been laid out very prettily. Imagine a nineteenth-century daguerreotype of young ladies at tea: that would be it.

  Two very dainty, antique-looking teacups on matching saucers, a plate of macaroons, red paper napkins in the shape of valentine hearts. Certainly this is an occasion: Mrs. Stockman has even groomed her (usually disheveled) hair, to a degree. She has changed from the perennial denim jumper to something resembling a dress, waistless, with billowing sleeves and a long skirt, of the kind a captive wife in a cult might wear, with a bright unwavering smile.

  The perfect girl is seated on a worn velvet love seat. The imperfect wife sits facing her in a cushioned chair that seems but grudgingly to contain the wife’s heft, her fleshy thighs that spill over the edge of the cushion like an excess of pudding poured into a mold.

  “… just thought I’d leave a little gift for … ‘token of my esteem’ …”

  Glancing about like a curious little bird wanting to see and to know what is not her business. Where the great Victor Stockman lives, how he lives and with whom.

  Such a messy house. Not to be believed.

  It smelled like—I don’t know … old, musty things.

  And his wife! The wife is so, so—awful …

  Having obsessively planned her stratagem for days, weeks, perhaps years the wife sees her hands moving briskly, deftly above the tea tray. If her visitor thinks it odd that the teacups appear to be half-filled with tea even as she and the wife sit down, the visitor gives no sign for she is easily distracted by the wife’s chatty remarks (weather: lovely; graduation in twelve days: so exciting) and her own audacity in being in the home of the adored Professor Stockman.

  Charming old teacups, pink rosebuds on white. As boring as you’d expect a great-grandmother to be but comforting.

  “I hope you like herbal tea, dear? My favorite at the moment is quite exotic—Bengal. Have you ever tasted it?”

  From out of a squat tortoise-colored teapot the wife pours steaming liquid into both cups. A rich, spicy singed-orange aroma wafts to their nostrils.

  “‘Bengal’? I—don’t know. It smells delicious.”

  With a display of childlike eagerness the long-legged Stacy reaches for one of the steaming cups. (As the wife might have anticipated, the girl reaches for the cup on the right.) If the husband could know the wife’s plan in
theory he would applaud it. For the husband is one of those American minimalist composers for whom “chance”—“the aleatory”—is a crucial element in creativity.

  The music of the aleatory, of chance.

  Whatever is, is meant to be.

  God is expressed through chance.

  Was that John Cage? Henry Cowell? Milton Babbitt? Stockhausen, or—Stockman?

  None of them believed in God for a moment. Yet it was common in such avant-garde circles to evoke God as a hypothetical agent, to diffuse one’s responsibility for a work of alleged art.

  “‘Bengal’—it’s meant to evoke India, tigers. It’s noncaffeine but tastes as if it might have caffeine—that tartness on the tongue.”

  “Y-Yes. It does …”

  The hapless girl takes a tentative swallow. The wife holds her breath as the girl coughs, just a little. But then, emboldened, wishing not to offend the wife who is staring so strangely at her, the girl takes a larger swallow, and manages not to cough.

  “Please take a macaroon! I didn’t make them myself.”

  The long-legged girl laughs startled at this remark, which the wife intends to be witty and disarming, not ironic or (self-) belittling.

  Politely the long-legged girl selects a macaroon to nibble like a rabbit.

  Probably, the girl is anorexic: eating a macaroon would be a reckless act for her. The wife resists asking her how much she weighs reasoning that she would not wish the girl to ask her.

  Not wanting to think that the girl might weigh one-third of Elinor’s weight. Just barely.

  The wife’s heart is beating rapidly. The wife’s heart feels enlarged to near-bursting.

  All this day she has been entranced. A very special day in the wife’s life she cannot (quite) believe has actually arrived.

  Breathing deeply and fully and with joy. A brazen sort of joy. In the upstairs bathroom and then in the kitchen on the first floor, the wife’s special places.

  The unused medications returned to their original places upstairs including the Deet to the shelf beneath the sink.

  No one will know. No one will guess. How possible? Why?

  With dogged inanity Elinor asks if the long-legged girl likes the Bengal tea and the girl murmurs enthusiastically—Yes. Elinor has grasped the remaining Wedgwood cup by its delicate handle and brings it to her lips.

  This is the cup to the girl’s left. Which is the cup to Elinor’s right.

  Still, it is pure chance. Perhaps in a sense all is chance.

  Saying, as if this were a remark of some profundity, “Usually, my favorite is cinnamon apple spice. I also like peppermint.”

  “Yes—peppermint. I do, too.”

  The girl seems cheered, drinking tea. The macaroon, though stale, must not be excessively stale, for the girl is eating it as a doll might eat, if a doll could eat, daintily, with self-conscious gestures.

  If the scene were a ballet, what sort of music would be played? Not Bartok—too strident. Not Stockhausen, or Stockman. Possibly, the lone pure enigmatic piano notes of Erik Satie that suggest something-to-come of a catastrophic nature.

  But how numb Elinor’s lips are starting to feel!

  Only her imagination since she has swallowed a very small quantity of tea.

  Crucial not to falter. Not after so much planning.

  (The tea does not taste strange. At least, no stranger than Bengal tea usually tastes.)

  (It is indeed tart, somewhat stinging. Which is why the wife has chosen it.)

  Since the dance recital the wife had done some research. She’d discovered that Stacy Donovan is the daughter of rich parents. Grandparents who’d donated so much money to the college that the library was (re)named for them—Donovan Library.

  It has been said that if the girl is asked about her last name, is she related to the Donovans who’d given money to the college, she will smile mysteriously and change the subject as if embarrassed.

  Of course, Stacy Donovan isn’t in the slightest embarrassed.

  At the college no one can recall what the library had been called previously. So quickly memories fade.

  Probably, Victor Stockman can’t recall the names of some of the undergraduate girls with whom he’d been in love, so desperately in love years before. But now, the long-legged Stacy has replaced these. The wife has no doubt, the husband knows Stacy’s name.

  Close up, the long-legged girl is indeed perfect. The wife can’t (reasonably) object to the husband’s infatuation with her except (of course) the wife is not reasonable. It is not fair to expect the wife to be reasonable.

  Patrician smile, flawless skin, clear pale-blue eyes, beautiful mouth. Dancer’s slender and poised body. Even the silver-blond hair falling straight beside her face seems to be natural, judging from the girl’s eyebrows and lashes.

  (No flaw anywhere? Really? The wife’s hungry eyes dart about the girl looking for a blemish, a pimple. A hidden tattoo peeking out of a sleeve.)

  Well. Here we do not have the cliché of the husband’s new love replicating the wife of thirty years ago. Fact is, Elinor never remotely resembled the long-legged girl at any age.

  Nor would any girl who looked like this have given a second glance to Victor Stockman in his early twenties. It was Stockman the genius, the avant-garde composer, Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet whom students tried to impress, bevies of young-girl students vying with one another to win the lustful attentions of Daddy.

  In her forties, or is it her fifties, the wife has gained weight about her hips, sides, breasts. Even as she has seemed to lose height. Once she’d been one of the taller girls in middle school; now she would be one of the squat dowdy girls, prematurely adult at twelve. Waist and hips have become indistinguishable, like camouflage. Breasts resemble foam rubber pillows that have begun to collapse from overuse.

  Swollen ankles, legs thick as an elephant’s and stippled with varicose veins. (If the beautiful visitor glances at these legs she will look quickly away, shaken.)

  The wife has been asking the visitor what she will be doing “next year”—a question so frequently asked of graduating seniors you would expect the girl to gag hearing it another time. But the long-legged girl is too well-bred not to give a sincere answer involving the word intern to which the wife does not listen.

  Difficult for the wife not to become distracted. Though telling herself it does not matter really—essentially—which of them has been drinking the lethal tea yet she is thinking Oh God what if. It is me.

  She had not planned beyond the gesture. Had been thinking it would be over in an instant but of course, no.

  Thinking how it is the husband’s fault of course. Should have poisoned him.

  The coward hadn’t had the moral courage to declare—I have something to tell you, Elinor.

  Bastard has been incapable of saying—It’s wrong to continue to deceive you when I love you.

  Moony-eyed. Dreamy-mouthed. In the bathroom in the shower humming loudly, obscenely. Oh, she can’t forgive him!

  Wife wants to bang on the bathroom door with both fists crying Do you think I don’t know what you are doing in there? You are disgusting—you make me sick.

  Well. She’d been pregnant after all. Several times. Which has contributed to her alarming weight gain. Her belly had never quite recovered from being so huge you’d have thought she was a kangaroo mother carrying twins in a pouch beneath a billowing smock.

  Something to tell you, darling. It isn’t easy. I am not proud. But I think—I think I will get over it, soon. Her.

  He has not said this. Will not.

  Instead, the long-legged girl is declaring in her trilling voice that Professor Stockman changed her life, totally—“He had faith in me when I did not have faith in myself …” Wiping at her eyes. Laughing thinly. The wife is impressed that the girl can utter such banal clichés, the auditory equivalent of detritus if not excrement, with no awareness that they have been uttered countless times before, by girls very like herself.

  Out of
nervousness the girl has drained her cup of Bengal tea. She has nibbled two macaroons. Is the wife imagining this?—the girl’s hands are shaky.

  “… bad time last fall, tried to keep it a secret … Tylenol … Lucky that I got sick to my stomach and no one ever knew. I did not tell Professor Stockman of course. But he gave me an extension on my senior thesis, he was sympathetic and seemed to know …”

  Elinor is pouring more Bengal tea into their cups. Splashing into the saucers. Her hands are shaking. Runaway heart in her chest feels swollen to the size of a basketball.

  Thinking, as she’d gained weight since the last of her pregnancies she’d become more fatalistic. Or perhaps it was her fatalism that was causing her to eat and drink more. (Especially drink. Near-empty bottles in the kitchen cupboards hidden behind canned goods.) Once, she’d been deeply in love with what’s-his-name, the owl-eyed young man with a clean-shaven weak chin, the musical prodigy who’d seemed to adore her. Or perhaps he had never been intimate with any girl before her and naturally he’d imagined it was the real thing—love.

  Each of the pregnancies had been an accident. Aleatory.

  He’d encouraged her to write about food as culture, food as pleasure, food as fetish, food as custom, ritual. Food as compensation for what is inaccessible, or has been lost.

  Here is the truth: the husband had loved Elinor, once. He had been proud of her, once. As he’d been a young, ardent composer once, intent upon creating a profound and original body of work.

  Folders of notes she’d assembled for her second book. Research slow as picking up grains of sand with a tweezers. Captivating, so slow. But finally she’d lost her way. Eating at the computer. Drinking. Online she’d begun to follow in secret several white supremacist websites. Deluded people, mostly male, who seemed sincerely to believe that there is something inherently valuable, God-ordained about an attribute so trivial as the hue of their skin.

  Amazing to Elinor, and gave her hope in a way: she, too, could be happy about something, take pride in—something.

  Hi! I am an overweight homely unhappy woman with a husband who is in love with a girl young enough to be our daughter and with children who quickly turn a corner if they see me somewhere outside the house. But I AM WHITE—so there!