Lovely, Dark, Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Rob Flint talked like that, yes. A successful administrator is one for whom the airy inflations and enhancements of speech come readily. And so, I would find myself responding in a similar way telling him that there was something unexpected in my life here—in this place—“and the Mississippi River”—“and having met you.” My voice trailed off, in the way of a sleepwalker who has walked out of sleep and into a dazzling daylight. I had approached but had not dared to utter the name Rob. But my eyes shone with tears of conviction and the little wound in my upper lip throbbed like a livid vein.

  Rob Flint kissed me, in a precise way to avoid the little wound. I staggered a little with the pressure of the man’s kiss, that felt like a strong shove with the palm of a hand; and a quick prodding tongue, that would not have tolerated resistance. I thought—He is repelled by the disfigurement. He doesn’t know this yet.

  Like my new friends at the college Rob Flint had expressed some concern about the wound, which had acquired a black zipper of a scab, and was still slightly swollen. I assured him that the wound was healing, and that it did not hurt. Rob Flint asked if I’d seen a doctor to make sure there was no infection and vaguely I said yes I had, I’d seen a doctor, and there was no infection.

  “You’re a stubborn person, Violet, aren’t you! I suppose that’s what makes you a poet and not, like the rest of us, a person of prose.”

  This remark was startling, and made me laugh. But I sensed some resentment in the words, and understood that, in a clash of wills, the president must always win.

  Rob Flint was an abrupt and crushing lover. There was something exuberantly impersonal in his lovemaking—his desire was like an avalanche, unstoppable. Even his curiously formal speech was a prelude to lovemaking that rushed like a flood, breathtaking, near-suffocating; such lovemaking did not require more than minimal cooperation on the part of the woman, who needed only not resist. And Rob Flint was the quintessential hunter—teeth damp and gleaming in pursuit, skin exuding a fever-heat. The pleasure in his exertions was explosive, to him; you could feel the shock of sexual release coursing through his body like a bolt of electricity. But he would say nothing, he would emit no sound. His face twisted in an effort of stoic silence.

  And then he would say, later—“And you, Violet? Are you happy, Violet?”

  This question was posed with some anxiety. And so of course I said Yes!

  I did not ask Rob Flint personal questions. I understood that Rob Flint would tell me all that he wanted me to know—beyond this, any curiosity on V___ N___’s part would be intrusive. I knew that Rob Flint preferred to drive his own car but that the college owned a black Lincoln Town Car manned by a driver in which he was taken frequently to the airport and to civil occasions; on presidential missions to meet with trustees, alumni, donors, politicians, bankers. I knew that Rob Flint had a family—children now fully adult and moved away; the age of his adult children would be a source of (minor, chronic) anxiety to Rob Flint, whose conception of himself was exclusively masculine.

  I knew that his wife was deeply unhappy, as she had to be a very lonely woman. To have been, even temporarily, the object of so ardent and fixed a sexual gaze would be to know immediately when that gaze shifts elsewhere. Yet I understood that his wife loved Rob Flint unstintingly. Such blindness, such desperation—the very essence of a certain kind of wifely love.

  Rob Flint returned to the subject of having “discovered” me—the early book of poems, the dust jacket photo. “You were wearing your hair in a single, long braid. You were gazing into the camera, without a smile. This had to be fifteen years ago at least—I was in a Barnes & Noble store in Philadelphia. I’d thought—I am going to meet this woman—this ‘poet.’ And I will meet her on my own terms, when I am ready to meet her.”

  How proud Rob Flint was of himself! For here was the hunter’s elation at the outcome of the hunt.

  I’d never worn my hair in a “single, long braid.” Rob Flint had not said he’d bought my book in the Barnes & Noble.

  I wondered if the conflict between the president and the Caldwalder committee had been more heated than I’d been led to believe. I felt the floor shift beneath me, that V___ N___ hadn’t been wanted at all. Rob Flint gloating to a subordinate how he’d succeeded in thrusting V__ N__ down the committee’s throats.

  Rob Flint laughed now, as if recalling exactly this.

  Later, as we lay together unclothed in the ridiculously large “king-sized bed” beneath a fringed four-posted canopy and an ivory satin coverlet Rob Flint said that he hoped I would not write “too overtly” about him, or the College—for already he’d come close to “creating scandal” at Garrison, having had policy disagreements with his board of trustees. “Trustees think, since they’ve hired you, that you are in their hire. But they are mistaken.”

  I said, “You’re a man of integrity. They hired you for that.”

  Rob Flint said, “Yes. You are right—‘a man of integrity.’ But when ‘integrity’ conflicts with personal interest, it’s ‘integrity’ that is expected to compromise.”

  As if to seal this remark, Rob Flint kissed me. My arms around his heavy shoulders tightened, and I thought—These are the things people say to each other, in this bed.

  Later, Rob Flint said, now in a rueful voice, “My marriage—it isn’t what people think.”

  I did not ask—What do people think?

  “It isn’t what it seems. Even in the eyes of our family—our children.”

  I wondered if I was being prompted to ask—But what does your marriage seem?

  I could not recall Elvira Flint—a kind of smiling ectoplasm hovered in her place. I felt rather than saw the woman’s covert, wistful expression when Rob Flint ushered me into the dining room in triumph, hand light against the small of my back.

  Like a hunter, Rob Flint had rituals. As a lover, he fell into a pattern of memorized behavior. A way of lovemaking, and a way of post-lovemaking. I would become in his arms the absent wife. He said now, “I can’t believe you’ll be leaving so soon, Violet. We will see each other again, won’t we? I want to see you again.”

  Tentatively I said, “I would like to see you again.”

  We were making statements, vows. You might have thought that we were speaking before witnesses.

  As I was rarely hungry until I began to eat, and then became ravenously hungry, so I’d had little feeling about Rob Flint until I uttered these words. Then, I felt a sharp pang, as of loss. And the little wound in my upper lip throbbed with renewed pain.

  Only now, I understood. I’d come to the old riverfront town on the Mississippi to fall in love with a man named Rob Flint who was the president of the local college, and a lifetime hunter. As my father was dying back in the East, so I was coming into my own life, as a woman, in the Midwest. This was the story: the (poet’s) (secret) biography.

  At the door Rob Flint kissed me in a way to avoid the wound in my upper lip. Remembering then the bottle of whiskey, and returning to the living room to take it with him. And in his ruddy face that look of relief, elation, guilt, satisfaction of a man who has been released from one woman but is not yet within the gravitational pull of the other woman.

  “Violet, good night! I will see you tomorrow.”

  THAT NIGHT, though it was very late I called my brother and left a message on his answering service.

  I called the hospice, and left a similar message.

  By 10:00 A.M. the next morning no one had called me back. I left for the college feeling like a condemned prisoner who has been reprieved for another day at least.

  THERE WAS A FAREWELL LUNCHEON for the Caldwalder Poet-in-Residence. Most of the guests were students, and a few of the guests were professors and instructors. It seemed that the students had “learned” from me. It was touching how, one by one, they lifted their glasses of cola, iced tea, sparkling water and ice water to honor V___ N___. The name (which had, for some reason, embarrassed me as a schoolgirl, though it was a quite ordinary quasi-“ethnic”
name) pronounced with such ceremony! A straw-haired girl with whom I’d seemingly become close, whose prose-poetry I had praised, became emotional and could not speak . . . And a (gay?) boy, the most gifted of the Garrison undergraduates, who’d been a favorite of mine, wiped at his eyes . . . I was touched; I was astonished; I was grateful; I was humble; I was disbelieving . . . As they took pictures of me with their cell phones, some of them posing beside me, I did not protest

  But—your admiration is misplaced! I am not writing poetry now—I am not a poet any longer. I am a hypocrite and a liar and I am not a good person but despicable and you should despise me for I have hidden away here on the farther bank of the Mississippi River while in the East my father is dying. As I’d been too cowardly to call the hospice that morning before leaving for the college, so I was too cowardly now to utter these words.

  I might have wept, but I did not weep. My (wounded, throbbing) mouth trembled. Witnesses would say that V___ N___ whose reputation was that of an “aloof” and “carefully calibrated” poet was revealed as a vulnerable and sentimental woman, with a mysteriously swollen mouth and anxious eyes. In a faltering voice I was trying to say how much I’d learned from my students at Garrison College, that instruction is not “one-way”; how, at this particular, difficult time in my life, I was touched by their warmth, their openness . . . (But why had I said Difficult time? I had not meant to say Difficult time.) As the halting words issued from me I recognized them as true, or true in some way—for the moment, in this place.

  With some ceremony, a gift was presented to me by the straw-haired girl. An unwieldy object, in elaborate gift-wrapping.

  Was I expected to open this? As everyone watched?

  The gift was an accordion file with a Chinese design of flowers and butterflies. A file in which to keep letters, or poems. It was quite a beautiful file and had surely been expensive. I felt my face heat, with a kind of shame. I thanked the students, stammering. I wiped tears from my eyes. “I—I will never f-forget . . . This has been a . . .”

  Unobtrusively at the rear of the room Rob Flint entered. He wore a beautifully tailored dark suit, a tasteful red necktie. He was glowing with presidential pride, like the owner of a prize steer at a county fair. “May I say a few words?” Rob Flint called out with the assurance of one whose request to speak had never been denied. The president of Garrison College had not been invited to this luncheon, it seemed. Or he’d been invited, but had had a more important engagement elsewhere. At once everyone turned to Rob Flint with smiles of happy expectation. For Rob Flint was a popular president, you could see.

  To the room of avid listeners Rob Flint spoke of my “devotion” to poetry and to the “young poets of Garrison College”—another time speaking of having “discovered” my poetry years ago. And Rob Flint expressed a hope that I would “return again, soon.” A faintness rose in me, a roaring in my ears.

  Was he offering V___ N___ a position at the college? I didn’t think so but—the president had that power, if he wished to use it, or misuse it.

  In a shaky voice I expressed the wish that this would occur, too. Yes, I hoped to return to Garrison College . . . My faltering words were lost within a sudden eruption of applause.

  Later that afternoon, at the inn, as I packed my two suitcases, I tried to recall how this awkward scene had ended. I’d been deeply moved and might have made a fool of myself—if anyone had noticed. (My sharp-eyed brother, no lover of poetry and hardly an admirer of his younger sister, would have noticed.) A small crowd of students and faculty members asked me to sign copies of my books and in this affable confusion Rob Flint disappeared as quickly and unobtrusively as he’d appeared. But already the memory was fading, like the carpets of the historic old inn. I had brought just two medium-sized suitcases to the college. I always traveled lightly, even negligently, like one who has been forced to pack for another person for whom one cares little. Most of the time I wore black on public, professional occasions for black is always appropriate. Cashmere-black, silken-black, black brocade. Black I could vary with colorful scarves, or necklaces, that were gifts from people it might be presumed I’d loved, and had once loved me—or so it would seem from this evidence. There had not been many.

  Since I had so little identity of my own, it was a practical strategy to dress in the gifts of others. I was a youngish-American-woman poet variant of H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man, who could make himself visible only by wrapping strips of gauze and bandages around his body, that he might clothe himself against the cold.

  For even if you are invisible, you will feel the cold.

  The phone rang, as I had been dreading it would ring. I could not bring myself to answer it, trembling badly.

  But then, the phone rang again, and blindly I lifted the receiver—shut my eyes like one stepping off a ledge. And the voice was not my brother’s voice, or my father’s faint, accusing voice, but the voice of Rob Flint who was saying that he was downstairs in the lobby—he’d had to see me “one more time” before I left for the airport.

  A taxi was coming, to take me to the airport. No more Garrison College escorts.

  “But should you come here, now? To my room?”

  I felt a pang of concern for Rob Flint. It was day, and not night: the chief administrator of Garrison College was behaving recklessly. I had the idea that he’d strode into the hotel by the front entrance, and not by the side entrance. He would be recognized in the lobby. He was a flamboyant local personality, he was known.

  Yet, Rob Flint came to my room, and shut the door behind him, and took my hands in his. I was terrified of what he would say—Look, Violet, I love you. I’m making my claim. You can go away from me but only if you promise to come back. The words were so vivid to me, almost I could not hear what Rob Flint was saying: how much he would miss me, what an opportunity this had been for all of the college community.

  I was moved. I was feeling shaky. Leave-takings are always difficult even when one hasn’t exactly been in the place in which one has been perceived to be.

  “Violet, we will all miss you!”

  “I—I will miss all of you . . .”

  We paused. We were breathless. Rob Flint was just slightly taller than I was, and at least forty pounds heavier. His silvery-brown hair lifted in airy tufts around his ears, which were larger than seemed normal. His face, overall, was a large face. Creases in his skin, particularly around his eyes, were kindly. His teeth were the teeth of perfection, providing him with confident smiles upon which a personality might be shaped. He was smiling, yet his smile had become tinged with concern.

  I was so frightened, I could almost not hear Rob Flint’s words. I dreaded him saying that I could not leave. In a flash of a fantasy I saw the man blocking the door and refusing to let me out.

  Rob Flint said, frowning, “Forgive me, Violet. I have something I must ask you.”

  “Yes?”

  Don’t ask if I might love you. Don’t tell me you love me.

  Rob Flint hesitated. You could see this straight-backed man lifting his rifle to his shoulder, sighting carefully along the barrel. His finger on the trigger. It requires a certain strength to pull a trigger, when something upright and living is sighted in your scope.

  “The first evening, the dinner at the President’s House, you remember . . .”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Did you, in the back room, where Elvira had taken you a few minutes before, happen to see—I mean, did you happen to take, by mistake, a little clock? A German ceramic clock, an antique, about this size . . .” Rob Flint made a circle of his hands, of the approximate size of a grapefruit. “It was fairly heavy, a white ceramic base, with some sort of floral design painted on it. My wife discovered that it was missing only just today . . .”

  There was a stunned pause. Though I was listening closely, I could not comprehend what Rob Flint was asking me.

  Quickly adding, “Violet, I have to ask.”

  “Are you asking me—did I take an antique cl
ock from your house?”

  “From the President’s House. Not mine.”

  “Did I—steal something from the President’s House? You are asking me?”

  “Well—by mistake, you might have taken it. You seemed tired and distracted that night . . .”

  “If I stole it. You are asking me.”

  “No. But if, by mistake, you happened to . . .”

  “‘Walk off with it.’ A ceramic German clock, the size of a grapefruit, and heavy. Your antique clock.”

  “Not ours. I’ve explained—it belongs to the President’s House. It belongs to the college.”

  I’d turned from Rob Flint and was making my way, not entirely steadily, to one of the windows. Though the inn was old, the windows were new: long, horizontal, plate-glass. Sunlight flooded through the glass, but it was sunlight filtered by a layer of grime on the outside of the glass. Dust motes in the air like manic atoms. I was stunned as if Rob Flint, who had been my lover, had struck me a blow to the solar plexus. A powerful blow from a practiced boxer can stop an opponent’s heart, it is said. It’s a cruel blow but it can be thrown easily if you have the strength and the skill and the will to do such lethal hurt, and if your opponent has no skills of self-defense.

  Carefully I licked my lips, that were cracked and aching.

  “Rob, you’re asking me, a woman you’d claimed to love . . .” (But had Rob Flint actually used the word love?) “. . . a woman who feels very strongly about you . . .” (But was this so?) “. . . if I’ve stolen from you and your wife and your college, what is it, a German clock . . . ?”

  “An antique clock, early eighteenth century. I don’t know what it’s worth, but—Elvira says it’s an expensive antique, and it belongs in the President’s House at Garrison College.”

  Rob Flint was looking both defiant and apologetic. He was stroking his chin in a gesture I had not seen before. In his presidential clothes he looked strangely distressed, like a mannequin with a cracked face. Belatedly he came to me, as if to comfort me. “Violet, I knew you hadn’t seen the damned clock. But I had to ask. Because it’s gone from the house, evidently, and there was no one . . .” Rob Flint paused, considering what he was saying. “My wife says there was no one else who could have—I mean, she thinks . . .”