Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The particular beauty, Alexis thought, of another’s decay—not our own.

  She’d been staring at a lighted window across the alley, on the fourth floor of one of the older buildings: inside, at what appeared to be a table, a man was sitting, eating—of his face, only his jaws were visible—and of his solid muscled body, only his torso and upper arms; the man might have been in his early or mid-thirties; he was dark-skinned, swarthy; he seemed to be speaking to another person, or persons, at the table, but Alexis couldn’t see anyone else; he was gesturing as he ate, with abrupt, jerky motions of his beefy arm, like a puppet—for how like puppet-movements our motions are, detached from speech and from the more subtle expressions of our faces. Alexis thought how odd this was—or maybe not so odd, since most people adhere strictly to their domestic schedules—that the dark-skinned man had been seated at the table the previous night, more or less in the same position, at about the same time, when she and David had been sitting outside on their balcony with glasses of wine. And, a flight up, in an adjoining building, almost directly across from the balcony, at one of the windows that had been shuttered through most of the day, a woman lay on a couch watching TV, as she’d watched TV the previous night; as it had been the previous night, the light in the room was an eerie pale blue that flickered and quivered. The woman was middle-aged, and full-bodied; Alexis was embarrassed to see that she wore something like a negligee, carelessly wrapped about her soft slack naked breasts, and her hair was blond, and disheveled; clearly, the TV-entranced woman had no idea that strangers were observing her in so intimate a way—(or did she?)—or that the sidelong sprawl of her body on what appeared to be an old, heavy piece of furniture suggested Rousseau’s iconic, final painting The Dream. As in the famous painting the framed image of the voluptuous-bodied woman in pale-bluish light exerted a powerful nostalgic aura—Alexis stared, and stared. (Was this voyeurism? Was she intruding, unconscionably, on another’s privacy? Or did the fact of the woman’s anonymity—and Alexis’s anonymity—somehow render the act innocent, as it could have no consequences for either individual?) “So strange! That woman, I mean—watching TV—you’d think she’d pull her blinds, or close her shutters, wouldn’t you? After all she must know—there’s a hotel here, people in many rooms, here . . .”

  Though there must have been at least thirty feet separating the balcony and the window, and, if the woman had glanced up, to peer out her window, she’d have had difficulty making out the couple sitting so very still on the darkened balcony two storeys above her, Alexis spoke in a lowered voice as if fearing the woman might hear her, and take offense.

  “What? Who? Oh—her . . .”

  It was a vague reply, coolly courteous. As often David replied to Alexis when she said something self-evident, banal, or of little interest to him.

  Hesitantly Alexis said: “I suppose we shouldn’t watch. It’s like that Hitchcock film, Rear Window—you don’t want to look, but . . .” Had she made the same remark, the previous night? Her words sounded familiar to her, unsettling.

  Carefully pouring the last of a miniature bottle of red wine into his glass—for Alexis had barely touched hers—David didn’t reply. If he’d been aware of the voluptuous sprawling woman on the couch and the dark-skinned man at the table he gave no sign as several times that day, in the art and archaeology museums they’d visited, he hadn’t appeared to be very much engaged in the exhibits though, dutifully, when not expressly forbidden by signs, he’d taken photographs of major artworks, the facades and interiors of churches, astonishing Roman views from windows and hillsides. For much of the evening he’d been in a distracted mood: he’d had too much to drink, which wasn’t like him, and at dinner, in a three-star Tuscan restaurant above the Spanish Steps that was highly recommended by his much-thumbed Michelin guide, he’d been upset by something on the bill—some ambiguity about the price of the wine, or the number of bottles of sparkling water they’d consumed, or the bill itself, which translated into U.S. currency was considerable.

  By degrees, as if bemused by Alexis’s interest in the anonymous individuals across the way, David began to observe them, too. Though, if he’d been alone—(he allowed Alexis to know this, obliquely)—he would scarcely have noticed them.

  “If this is an intimate look into the lives of ordinary Romans—it certainly isn’t very revealing, or significant.”

  “Oh but I think it is ‘revealing’—‘significant.’ We can’t judge people by just seeing them, outwardly.”

  “We can’t? How do you think they judge us?”

  “I don’t see why we should judge other people at all. Just to see them, to acknowledge them as different from ourselves . . .” Alexis’s voice trailed off, she’d lost the thread of what she meant to say. Now another window had lighted up, like a stage set, on the fifth floor of a stucco building to the right of their balcony; this building, the width of two windows of ordinary size, was so narrow as to resemble a tower, that had faded to a faint sepia color like an old photograph. The roof of the building was partly ceramic tile, cracked and broken, and partly the ruins of an abandoned roof garden in which tall grasses and wildflowers grew. Alexis had noticed this garden before, and had wished that someone, a child perhaps, might have climbed the outdoor stairs to it, but no one had come. There was something both slovenly and exquisite about the narrow building, that reminded Alexis of an illustration in a child’s storybook.

  Inside the newly illuminated room, through a scrim of tissue-thin curtains, a figure was moving, indistinctly. Alexis couldn’t see if it was a woman or a man who’d switched on a dim light, or had lighted just a candle. Alexis said, in her conspiratorial lowered voice: “It seems wrong to watch them somehow, but—I suppose—it’s harmless. They aren’t actually doing anything—like the characters in Rear Window.”

  David said, with a snort of derision: “They certainly aren’t doing anything of interest! And it isn’t as if, their windows open to the world as they are, they can have any expectation of privacy.”

  “Well—we can’t see their faces, anyway. We have no way of knowing who they are.”

  Alexis spoke uncertainly. She was beginning to feel ashamed, so openly staring into a stranger’s window.

  But now, in the newly illuminated interior, the shadowy figure was moving briskly; unlike her neighbors who seemed inert as waxworks figures this one was intent upon an action, or a sequence of actions, of some precision, though it wasn’t clear what she was doing—dressing? undressing? posing in front of a mirror? dancing? Alexis strained to hear—was it music?—jangling hard-rock pop-American music?

  David, no longer indifferent, stared frankly at this new scene. It was soon clear that the shadowy figure was that of an attractive young woman, or girl, with swaths of shining black hair that fell to her waist—exposed white shoulders and upper arms, bare legs—(was she undressed? in a camisole top of some near-transparent material, or in night-wear?)—and she seemed to be alone; except that she was talking, or singing, to herself, as she moved her arms about provocatively, shifted and wriggled her breasts, her narrow hips, and shook her startlingly black hair, to the accelerated beat of not-quite-audible music; very like a seductive figure in a film who while solitary, glimpsed in isolation, is yet assured of being observed by countless staring strangers. How reckless of the girl, to leave her window unshuttered, or her blinds open, facing the Hotel Bellevesta with its seven floors of rooms! Alexis thought She must know that we are watching. That someone is watching. It was dismaying to her, alarming, that her husband would stare so openly at the partially undressed girl even as she, Alexis, was sitting close beside him, invisible to him as if he were alone on the balcony.

  “I suppose—we should go to bed. It’s past midnight.”

  “Is it!”

  Unlike the others who scarcely moved, the girl with the waist-long black hair kept in motion, a sort of frenetic, continuous motion, like an animated doll. She was slender, agile—spirited. As David and Alexis stared she stopped
abruptly, turned and hurried out of the room—like an actress unexpectedly leaving a stage, to the surprise and disappointment of her audience—but then returned, carrying something—a sort of stick, or wand; with quick steps she came to the window, as if to peer accusingly upward, at the American couple staring at her from their balcony above, but instead she disappeared behind the wall; a moment later reappearing, and then disappearing—were her movements deliberate? teasing?—or accidental? In the background, on what appeared to be steps in a doorway, a small creature appeared—a cat, or a dog—that brushed against the girl’s bare ankles sensuously.

  “No, a dog. One of those little yapping breeds.”

  Like the girl, the little animal disappeared, and reappeared; it followed the girl out of the room, and back into the room; approached the window, and disappeared beneath the windowsill, as if (perhaps) there was a food dish there. The girl paused to pet the animal, and to talk to it. (Or was someone else in the room, out of sight, to whom the girl was speaking?) Beside the attractive animated girl the other, older woman and man seemed very dull; they resembled those eerily bulb-headed, featureless and bandaged-looking mannequins in the early Surrealist paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, Alexis had seen the previous week in a museum exhibit in Florence.

  David disliked the Surrealists. David disliked and distrusted any art—any way of life—that did not acknowledge what was real; and, to David, what was real was obvious and incontestable as looking into a mirror. Of course, the girl was young—much younger than the others. An aura like a flame seemed to glow about her slender limbs, and in the scintillate waves of her waist-long black hair. Her face was obscured to them, behind the gauzy curtain, but appeared to be heart-shaped, and the skin markedly white.

  “See what she’s doing now?”

  “What? What is she doing now?”

  “Vacuuming.”

  David was correct: the girl had dragged a small canister vacuum cleaner into the room, and was briskly vacuuming the floor, chairs and cushions. And so late, past midnight! There was something grimly frenetic about her movements as if she knew herself observed, and her hyperactivity was in some (reproachful) relation to her invisible audience, a rebuke to their voyeuristic passivity.

  Alexis said, uneasily, “She should draw her blinds, or shutter her windows—anyone could be watching from the hotel. A man could try to figure out where she lived, and come to find her . . . She’s old enough to know better. She isn’t a child.”

  The girl seemed to have shed another article of clothing. For it was very warm in the mid-summer Roman night that was airless in this part of the city. Beneath the thin white camisole shift she was wearing just very brief white panties.

  “It could be dangerous. Her behavior. Who knows who might be watching, if not tonight, some other night. In the United States . . .”

  Alexis tried not to sound reproachful, resentful. It might have been the girl’s very recklessness she envied.

  David continued to stare frankly at the girl some thirty feet away, with a look of faint disdain, bemusement. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his forehead creased. He’d been tired out by the exertions of the long day and the long tourist-days had been accumulating since their departure from Logan Airport two weeks before. As he stared, the seductive-teasing girl vanished, again. It was impossible not to think—even as it was unlikely—that the girl was aware of her audience, and wanted to torment them. In her wake the little white creature rushed out of the room on short, clumsy legs. Abandoned on the carpet was the small canister vacuum cleaner with its hose like an outflung limb.

  In the other windows, there began to be a minimal sort of movement. In the pale-blue-TV-lighted window, the woman on the couch roused herself, as if from a trance; she was sitting up, or partially sitting up; her negligee swung open even as, with a sort of mock alarm, her plump arms lifted shielding her breasts. Her broad heavy-jawed face was partway in shadow and had the look of a half-face—a kind of primitive mask. In the other, lower window, at last the dark-skinned man rose from his place at the table, and moved toward the window; still, his face wasn’t visible—only just the lower part of his torso, cut off by the window frame. On the table behind him were plates, a glass and a wine bottle . . . You could see that there was a lighted candle on the table, that had burnt low.

  “Well! We should go to bed, it’s late . . .”

  David said nothing. He made no move to rise. Alexis knew she shouldn’t make this request more than once: though David frequently ignored her remarks, he did not like her to repeat them.

  “ . . . almost twelve-thirty. And tomorrow, the Sistine Chapel . . .”

  This seemed funny, somehow. Tomorrow, the Sistine Chapel! The ancient ruins of the Roman Forum! The Colosseum! The Palatine! The Vatican, the Borghese Gallery, St. Peter’s Basilica!

  On the wrought-iron balcony outside their seventh-floor room in the Hotel Bellevesta they sat, the middle-aged American couple, as if unable to move; in a pleasurable trance gazing across the alley at a row of mostly darkened and shuttered apartment buildings. Above were rooftops obscured by shadow and farther above, the Roman sky, opaque with layered clouds, lightless, that resembled a cathedral ceiling, its fanatical detail softened by shadow.

  Just when you think that your life is run-down.

  Just when you think that your life is frayed, worn. Done.

  If they’d had children, perhaps. But there had not been a time for children, not the time.

  David had said, wait. We can wait. And Alexis had said—(what had Alexis said?)—Alexis had said yes. Of course we can wait.

  Now, so many years later it could not ever be the time. What had been the time was now, irrevocably, past. And so they’d come to Italy, to a succession of beautiful Italian places—after Venice they’d gone to Padua, Verona, Milan—to Bologna, Florence, Sienna and San Gimignano—and at last Rome. In planning their trip, David had booked them longest in Rome.

  Ostensibly, to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary: this was the account they gave to others, that others were happy to hear.

  For all journeys are journeys of desperation—the journey takes us away.

  For most of the time that she’d known him, David had been a man driven and defined by his work: obsessed, ambitious. There was a particular sort of joy—Alexis didn’t want to think that it was inevitably masculine, but she’d never seen it in any woman of her acquaintance—in ambition that has triumphed. (Triumph over a rival? Is there any other sort of triumph? In the Pitti Palace in Florence Alexis had stared appalled at a succession of over-life-sized sculpted figures by Michelangelo depicting Hercules in the quasi-heroic act of killing his opponent—Antaeus, an Amazon warrior, a centaur, among luckless others. The Triumph of Victory was the bombastic title. Tourists whose nerves would have been shattered by a poorly prepared restaurant meal or hotel rooms lacking adequate services stared solemnly at these ugly tributes to brute masculinity, knowing themselves in the presence of serious art. There was no female equivalent to such extravagant and excessive brutality nor even the general recognition that such an equivalent might be missing.)

  Within their social circle, and certainly within their families, David was considered a highly successful man. To David himself, his success was marred by the fact that others were more successful, who did not seem deserving, as he knew himself deserving. Now, in recent years, these rivals were fading, disappearing; David’s new rivals were of another generation entirely, young enough to be his children, though David didn’t feel paternal toward them, any more than they felt filial toward him. Hired in a shrinking job market, these young rivals were yet more highly paid than David had been, at the same rank, after adjustments for inflation; he knew that they were unbeatable—time was on their side. He hadn’t become embittered but only, as he often said, sharper, wiser. This sharpness showed in his face: beneath his smile of bemused or ironic well-being was an abiding wariness, the alertness of one who is anxious not to be disrespected, taken-less-seriou
sly than he merits. David’s once-abundant hair had thinned and his skull was prominent, like some implacable inorganic substance; almost, Alexis couldn’t remember what he had looked like as a young man. His contemporary self, his middle-aged self, had seemed to have consumed his youth. Yet he seemed to her attractive, still—despite his ironic way of frowning while smiling as if the very act of smiling were a sign of weakness, vulnerability. He had not had patience with weakness in himself or in others and now that he was older, he was having to adjust his sense of manliness. As a man ages the Darwinian notion of natural selection shifts its meaning and other types of morality begin to exert their appeal.

  “A barbaric world—but what art!”

  Another time they’d gone to the ancient ruins for which the city was best known. The old, unspeakably cruel yet “noble” civilization that predated the modern, its acres of rubble set off by fluorescent-orange construction barriers—a jarring juxtaposition of ugly synthetic materials and the sun-baked stone of antiquity. Everywhere were decayed but yet beautiful carvings, monuments that seemed to Alexis’s untrained eye a testament to the uses of futility—the uses one might make of futility.

  The history of the great Roman empire was fraught with savage cruelty, violence, and delusion, yet a visionary self-assurance that seemed lost now, in the West. Who could believe that gods mated with mortals, to create a race of demigods? Who could believe that there was anything godly in even the stunning blue Mediterranean sky? Or that any “empire” was privileged over another?

  Christian Rome, and Catholic Rome that followed—so many centuries!—another empire inflated and inspired by metaphysical delusion and the terrifying self-assurance of delusion. But these centuries, too, had waned, and could not be resuscitated.