Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  There was a smell of candles, or incense—the odor I’d inhaled from the wallet.

  Seeing the gaily colored scarf tied around the lamp shade reminded me of something I’d forgotten—how I had brought a birthday present, a little silk scarf, for the pretty, popular girl whose locker was beside mine in eighth grade homeroom. Crystal Donovan was the girl’s melodic, wonderful name, a name I’d often whispered to myself, or wrote in my notebook. Around the gift box I’d wrapped a red velvet ribbon. The birthday card was one I’d taken time to choose, and it had been, like the little scarf, far more expensive than I would have expected. Crystal had been delighted with the gift, or had seemed so: she’d thanked me, and kissed me, and told others about it, and meant to tie it around her neck except someone came along, one of her closer girlfriends, or a boy, and so she’d absentmindedly set the box on her locker shelf, and forgot it.

  Mr. Nivecca was talking about his wife—and their little daughter—in a rapid nervous voice. I couldn’t follow the thread of his remarks—I was thinking, just a little, of Crystal Donovan, and wondering what had become of her.

  Like Anna-Marie, she’d gotten married young, I was sure. Had a baby, or babies. Young.

  Meanly I thought—It doesn’t mean so much, then. Having a man’s baby. You can lose him—he can lose you.

  The aggrieved husband was telling me how he’d first met Anna-Marie in a local park—(of course, it was a park familiar to me, overlooking the river)—when she’d just graduated from high school, though he hadn’t known she was so young; she’d been at a picnic with friends and she’d run toward him, out of nowhere, laughing, and touched his wrist, and said something about a game of tag—“And you’re it.” It would turn out, Anna-Marie was engaged at the time, and Jalel hadn’t known. He’d driven her in his car to Lake Ontario, a half-hour’s drive, and they’d walked on the beach, and waded in the water: “And I asked, ‘Who is it you’re engaged to, if you’re out here with me?’ And Anna-Marie said, ‘It’s an experiment. If I’m here with you, that means—I’m not with him.’ ”

  She’d broken off that engagement. They were married a year later. They’d always had a “pretty emotional” relationship—breaking up, getting together again—breaking up . . . Except, once you are married, Jalel said, you can’t break up.

  “Anna-Marie was always a happy person—except when she wasn’t. I don’t mean that she’s crazy—she is not crazy. She’s been a good mother, most of the time. But after Isabelle, she’s been more unpredictable. She cries a lot, and she drinks. And more than wine. There’s this secret side to her. Sometimes when I’d return home, from work, she wasn’t here—she’d come home hours later and say she’d been ‘just walking’—‘just driving.’ She’d have left the baby with her mother or the girl next-door. Once, she said she’d been ‘in the cemetery.’

  “(I even followed her once—and she did drive over into the cemetery. Her father had been buried there a few months before.) She likes to sing—loud—when she’s alone in the house with just Isabelle—or driving her car—but if I hear her, if she knows I’m nearby, she’ll stop. And she gets angry with me saying I’m spying on her. Christ!” Jalel paused, lowering his quivering voice. “I think Anna-Marie has a life I don’t know anything about—nobody does. When we got married her sister told me, ‘You think you can get to know Anna, but you can’t. You can never trust Anna.’ I thought it was bitchy of her, at the time.”

  We were standing in the living room, in front of the muted TV, of which the aggrieved man took no notice. What was strange was that it seemed altogether natural that Jalel Nivecca should speak to me in this intimate way—as if we knew each other, and he needed me to listen.

  Even before entering the Nivecca house, I’d begun to feel a stir of emotion that was new to me, weirdly new, unsettling. If anyone should ever love me in the way that Jalel loved Anna-Marie—not a calm placid marital love but this other, passionate, operatic love—if anyone should ever desire me in such a way, yearn for me, brood over me—how romantic this would be! I had not known many boys or young men well—I had not yet had what was delicately called a steady boyfriend—(meaning a guy with whom one had sex, and was expected to have sex)—and so my experience was very limited. Boys I’d known were down-to-earth and practical: if I’d begun to behave oddly, like Anna-Marie, if I’d exhibited “emotional” tendencies, they would simply have stopped seeing me, and kept their distance.

  I understood: I wouldn’t have blamed them. We don’t want to—we can’t afford to—expend our love on someone we can’t trust, who will squander our love, and leave us abandoned.

  Still, music celebrated this other sort of passionate, unbridled and unpredictable love. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde . . .

  Music that had the power to unsettle, disturb. The power to burrow beneath the skin.

  “Anna-Marie is a good, loving mother, when she’s here. I mean when, in her mind, she’s in this place . . . with us. She said she’d wanted to have a baby ‘to wake me up—to make me responsible.’ But it hasn’t seemed to make any difference. And sometimes I think—I have reason to think—she’s seeing other men . . .”

  For a man, nothing could be more upsetting or shameful. Jalel spoke bitterly yet matter-of-factly.

  I wanted badly to help him. Impulsively I said, “Maybe I could look at your wife’s things?”

  I’d seen programs on TV about psychics. I’d read, in the local paper, that a “psychic” had been consulted by police, in their search for a missing child.

  “Yes, Nadia! Maybe—who knows?—you will think of something.”

  Far from being offended by my naïve suggestion, in his distracted and distraught state Jalel Nivecca seemed to think it was an excellent idea.

  “Good! Yes! ‘Look at her things’—upstairs.”

  Jalel had me proceed him, up the stairs.

  Which made me uncomfortable. Though it was only good manners—I supposed.

  Thoughts flew at me like panicked hornets—Why am I here, what is this place? Who is this man I’ve never seen before?

  Yet it had seemed to me, from the first, seeing Jalel Nivecca’s face in the snapshots in his wife’s wallet, that I had seen him before, and in some way knew him.

  Unless this was delusion.

  (Was this delusion? I could not think so, my feeling for Jalel seemed matched by his for me, and it came very strong.)

  Close behind me on the stairs he was breathing audibly, as if out of condition, for a youngish man who looked fit. A faint scent of something like wine or whiskey wafted to my nostrils and I wondered if he’d been drinking.

  The stairway was narrow and unusually steep. The brownstone row houses of south Carthage are old, built in the late nineteenth century, places where mill- and dockworkers once lived.

  Upstairs there was a smell of unlaundered clothes, towels and bedding. I recognized the smell from my college dorm in which undergraduate girls lived happily slovenly lives out of sight of their elders. Though the bedroom into which Jalel guided me wasn’t unusually messy—just lived-in; a satin bedspread pulled up over a probably unmade bed, a few articles of clothing scattered about. And an ordinary lamp shade about which a colorful scarf had been tied, now badly askew.

  “This is our bed. This is Anna-Marie’s side.”

  Jalel guided me, his hands on my shoulders. As if I were a blind girl, gifted with “second sight.”

  He was taller than I was, by several inches. And I was a tall girl, five feet nine inches.

  His hands were warm, just slightly heavy. I could not recall any man—anyone—placing hands on my shoulders like this, both leaning on me just a little and guiding me in such a way that I could not have turned aside if I’d wished.

  “D’you ‘see’ anything, Nadja? D’you ‘smell’ anything?”

  My heart was beating rapidly. I could not see very clearly, and I could not “smell” anything except the incense-fragrance, unwashed laundry, Jalel Nivecca’s faint-alcohol-breath.

&n
bsp; “No. Not yet.”

  “Her pillow. Here. Nadja.”

  Jalel lifted the pillow fumblingly. Jalel held it to my face—not hard, not uncomfortably close—but in a way I found awkward, for I could not breathe except to breathe in the intimate odors of the woman—I think this is what I was smelling. A reflexive panic made me pull away, and Jalel, laughing irritably, replaced the pillow on the bed, beside the other, matching pillow: his.

  He’d begun to call me, not “Nadia” but “Nadja.” I couldn’t determine—had he forgotten my name, or was this a very subtle, just perceptible sort of jeering, mockery of a female name?

  On the cluttered top of a bureau with a large oval mirror there was a tortoiseshell hairbrush, and in the hairbrush were dozens of long, tangled blond hairs. This hairbrush I lifted as if to study. The bristles were not very clean.

  “D’you see where she might be? Eh?”

  The bureau top was covered with an embroidered cloth, soiled with spilled powder. Lipsticks, earrings, wadded tissues, a plastic comb with broken teeth. More framed snapshots crowding one another.

  In the mirror, I saw a man watching me with an unreadable expression. One of his eyelids was drooping just discernibly. His mouth twitched into a dreamy smile.

  Absurdly I thought—This is how we have met. This is our fate. I will help him put together his life.

  I examined Anna-Marie’s earrings, inexpensive but attractive costume jewelry, miniature green “gems” meant to be emeralds set in faux-gold. I shut my eyes—my eyelids were quivering with strain—hoping to “see”—exactly what, I had no idea.

  Next, Jalel opened a bureau drawer and placed in my hand something silky-soft—the lacy top of a half-slip which I pressed against my face with a little shiver of dread.

  “Is she in—daylight? Or is it dark where she is?”

  My eyes remained shut. Badly I was wishing that a vision would come to me—any vision.

  “Is she—breathing? Is she alive?”

  Jalel Nivecca stood close beside me. I knew that he was regarding me in the mirror but I did not dare open my eyes, to see.

  A sensation like smothering, smothering-mud, very dark, glutinous, hideous, came over me, and I shuddered.

  “What is it, Nadja? Some kind of—sign? Eh?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  He seemed both agitated and oddly jocular. As if he knew that what we were doing was ridiculous, and yet—!

  One of his hands fell casually onto my left shoulder, but did not take hold; I felt his fingers, hard but harmless, trailing down my back, lightly on my hips, and away, as you might stroke a cat or a dog, mildly affectionately but not very seriously.

  “There’s her towels and things, in here. Nadja.”

  The bathroom was a small cramped dispirited room with a waterstained ceiling. Again it seemed that the ceiling was low—lower than the bedroom ceiling. On the medicine cabinet mirror was a patina of dried water-splotches and fingerprints. Hair and scummy-dried soap in the sink. The toilet was comparatively new, with a swanky plastic seat and a lid covered in bright green shag.

  Jalel handed me a rumpled towel, wordlessly. I pretended to inhale its odor—my eyelids fluttered shut, in terror of what I might see.

  “No luck? Nothing? She’s off our radar—y’think?”

  Jalel drew back the shower curtain which, too, was comparatively new, and not yet stained or ragged. In fact there were two curtains: the inner, which was utilitarian plastic, and transparent; and the outer, which was ruffled white and red organdy.

  The tub was old, but clean; the bathroom smelled of cleanser. I thought—She cleaned this part of the house, before she left.

  Or—He has cleaned this part of the house, to remove the memory of her.

  “I found this, here. I wasn’t sure if I should—what I should do—if . . .”

  Jalel was pointing to an unfolded piece of paper, which had been placed beneath a pearl-like seashell, on the back of the toilet. It was a strange place for a note to be left—something about it filled me with dread.

  “Did you read it? What it said?”

  “I read it, and I—put it back where it was. She never did anything like this before, I mean—leaving a note. Any kind of explanation, that wasn’t like her. I found it when I came home from work last night. Isabelle was in bed. I hunted for Anna-Marie all over the God-damned house, up and down and in the basement, and I found this here—Don’t worry. I know you won’t. I will be back before you miss me.”

  Jalel showed me the note which was written in pencil, and so shakily written, as if on an inadequately hard surface, the point had pierced the paper many times and the message was all but indecipherable.

  “You can’t help me, Nad-ja? Even reading this? She’d have had to think about it, writing something like this. See, there’s an insult in it. Will be back before you miss me.”

  I held the sheet of paper in both hands. I didn’t think that I could have read the message, if Jalel hadn’t read it for me. When I shut my eyes, I felt dizzy. The smell of the man, his breath, his body, and his unwashed hair made my nostrils pinch.

  “N-No. I’m afraid that I . . . I can’t help you.”

  “You can’t help me? Why’d you say you could?”

  “I didn’t s-say that I could. I don’t think I said that.”

  “You said that, Nad-ja. You were boasting.”

  “I don’t think so, Mr. Nivecca. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  “You haven’t disappointed me. You just haven’t helped me. Are you saying that I should call the police?”

  “I—don’t know. Maybe—if she doesn’t come back by tonight.”

  “If she doesn’t call. You’d think, the mother of a four-year-old little girl, she’d call—but you’d be wrong. She didn’t call.”

  “She might call, yet. You said it hasn’t been so long . . .”

  “I’d have to show the police this note. They would want to take it. I want to keep it.”

  We left the bathroom. The dizziness began to lighten. I saw the doorway: the stairs was just beyond. If necessary, I could run—I could run to the stairs.

  The man would outrun me, I knew. My shoulders throbbed still with the grip of his fingers and he had not gripped my shoulders nearly so hard as he might have.

  We were leaving the bedroom. We descended the stairs. I was ahead of the man, my heart kicking and thumping like a big clumsy drunken bird. Almost disbelieving I heard myself offer to make a meal for him—“You must be hungry, Mr. Nivecca?”

  If she has left him. If he is lonely.

  He thanked me, gratefully. He guessed he was hungry, yes—he couldn’t remember when he’d eaten last.

  “You are—like an angel. Sent to me in my hour of need.”

  He laughed, he was speaking playfully. I tried to laugh, to fall in with his ever-shifting mood.

  You will say that I was naïve, stupid. You will say that I was reckless. But I think that I was only just desperate. A girl who had not—yet—been in love, and whose parents’ marriage seemed to have bled dry of love. Only responsibility remained, an atmosphere of angry duty in my parents’ household.

  Badly I yearned to be put to the test—I wasn’t sure what the test would be.

  I wanted to be unafraid. Or, if afraid, I wanted not to succumb to fear.

  As I moved about Anna-Marie Nivecca’s kitchen I was shivering with excitement, apprehension. I could not bring myself to check the time—I’d spent nearly an hour in the Nivecca house, I knew; all this while, my mother had been waiting for me.

  There was a matter of taking my grandmother to the clinic for tests. And while she was away, her room—her bedroom at the rear of her house with its melancholy unspeakable odors—had to be cleaned; the stained bedding “aired”; the stained floor scrubbed and polished. Hours of work, manual work, set beside which my boring job in the college library was a lark on a summer’s day. I thought—There is joy in life, a terrible joy. There is
joy for the taking if you are not afraid.

  Jalel Nivecca leaned in the doorway watching me, brooding. I smiled to think that the man, the husband, wasn’t in the habit of helping Anna-Marie prepare a meal even when the meal was for him.

  “Even if she does come back—can I trust her? What if she hurts Isabelle? Takes Isabelle with her—wherever she goes? Like, the cemetery? Jesus!”

  I opened a can of soup—“Italian Wedding”—to heat on the stove. In the refrigerator—that smelled of old, stale, slightly rancid food—I discovered a half-loaf of whole grain bread, a chunk of Swiss cheese, several soft tangerines and a jar of apricot jam. Jalel sat at his place at the kitchen table—unmistakably, that chair was his; I sat nearer the stove and the sink. He ate hungrily. The sight of the man eating the food I’d prepared was immensely satisfying. I thought—I will remember this, all my life.

  “Last night was hell. I’m not going through that again. I got in the car and drove—after my mother took Isabelle home with her—I drove in places where I thought Anna might be—past houses—people we knew—her women friends—places we used to go: restaurants, bars—everything was shut up and dark. I guess I was kind of crazy—I couldn’t sleep anyway. Can’t sleep now. It’s like—now—I’m asleep with my eyes open. I’m ‘eating’—but it isn’t real. I was thinking—She wouldn’t go outside the marriage, no matter how she felt. No matter who was telling her he was crazy for her, he’d be better for her than me. She would not go outside the marriage—would she? There’s been men before I met her, not just the ‘fiancé.’ There’s one—or two—would’ve liked to kill her, she said. She’d laughed . . .”

  Near the end of our meal, the phone rang.

  Jalel leapt up from the table, his chair overturned.

  Ashen-faced he lunged for the phone, that was on the kitchen wall.

  “H’lo? H’lo?”

  I felt a pang of hurt, loss. I could not help but know—He will never love another woman, like this. She will never let him go.

  But it was just Jalel’s mother on the phone. She had no news of Anna-Marie. Eagerly Jalel told her about Anna-Marie’s wallet being found on the train, when it was found and by whom, but he said little about me, he did not mention my name or the fact that I was sitting three feet away from him; in the terse recapitulation of the morning’s events, it had been a “nice college girl” who’d found the wallet and brought it to him.