Lovely, Dark, Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates

  SHE DID HATE HIM! She hated him that he no longer loved her, as he had loved her once.

  “Jesus, Julia! I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean it.”

  He’d meant it. She knew.

  She’d seen the look in the husband’s face, of unfettered loathing. She’d felt a sudden flaring of loathing for him, as a struck match may light another match, very quickly, before there is time to extinguish it.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—whatever I did, to provoke you.”

  Through the years of her marriage she’d been loved by the man. She’d been prized, protected. The husband’s love had been a warm light shining upon her, a continuous light, sunshine of the sort we take for granted until, one hour, a cloud eclipses it and we find ourselves shuddering in the cold, bereft.

  So saying to him, in her soft plaintive guilty voice, “Yes, I forgive you, Ryan. Will you forgive me?”

  IN THIS WAY, days passed. The remainder of their lives.

  Each understood that the other had been deeply shocked. If marriage is a masquerade, there is the very real danger that masks may slip.

  The wife had seen that the husband did not love her, and was lost, as if she’d kicked free of gravity, for without the husband to love her, how was it possible for the wife to love him?

  She’d loved in the husband his regard for her. His respect for her, and his wish to protect her. She could not imagine her life without this fierce love for the man, that was her reason for being, as, years before, being a mother to their child had been her reason for being, unquestioned as breath.

  Terrible things she told herself, as if to test herself.

  It’s over. The masquerade. Now, we can die.

  SHE MEANT NONE of this! Of course.

  She was anxious for him. She loved him, and was fearful of losing him—she wasn’t sure how, or why.

  In his closet, in their bedroom—Ryan’s clothes on hangers seemed fewer than she recalled, no longer crammed tightly together.

  On Ryan’s side of the cedar closet in the hall, where his winter suits, sport jackets and trousers were hung inside plastic, moth-proof bags, Julia was certain there was more space than there’d been previously. At the bottom of these plastic bags were neatly folded sweaters of Ryan’s, mostly gifts from Julia, and these too seemed to have diminished.

  Was Ryan giving things away? Or—was Ryan moving things away, to another residence?

  She felt stricken to the heart. She felt betrayed anew.

  She couldn’t trust her husband to tell her the truth. No wife can trust her husband, the very relationship wife makes deceit inevitable.

  When she asked Ryan if he’d discarded some of his clothing he’d seemed at first not to know what she was talking about. Then he said, not meeting her eye, “That Vietnam Veterans’ organization that comes by in vans—I gave them some things, a few months ago. I think that was it.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Where were you? How the hell would I know, Julia?”

  “Did someone ring the doorbell? Did they come to the house here? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Ryan laughed, irritably. Julia knew that she was annoying him, indeed she was annoying herself, but could not seem to stop. It was the very pettiness of the situation that provoked her.

  “I think I did tell you.”

  “No. You did not, I’d have remembered.”

  “I left their card in the kitchen. On the counter, with the mail.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She could not give it up, she knew he was deceiving her. Giving away expensive clothing, sweaters that had been presents from Julia, cashmere, hand-knit, beautiful—why would Ryan do such a thing? Why, so secretly? Perversely? It wasn’t as if their closets were overflowing, and winnowing was necessary.

  Another time, Julia checked Ryan’s bureau drawers—socks, underwear. These, too, seemed to be diminished, somewhat.

  But she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t ask him.

  Of course, the issue was trivial. It shouldn’t matter. She didn’t truly think that her husband of forty-four years was moving out, to another, secret residence. (Did she?)

  Still, some weeks later she checked Ryan’s closet again. And the cedar closet. And it seemed to her, yes—more of Ryan’s things were missing. She could even identify some of them: favored neckties, shirts, sweaters, the camel’s hair sport coat, his older gray pinstriped suit. He is abandoning his old life. He is going—where?

  OFTEN NOW, she felt panic. A sensation as of great beating wings descending upon her, sucking up oxygen, leaving her cringing, faint.

  Embarrassing to love another person more than the other person loves you. Like wrong-sized persons on a teeter-totter. The heavier determines the motions of the teeter-totter, the lighter is in the other’s control and might be dropped to the ground, unceremoniously.

  Impulsively she resumed the old antagonism: “Ryan, tell me: we don’t have a gun in the house now, do we?”

  “A gun—? Don’t be ridiculous, Julia. Please.”

  “But—do we?”

  Ryan was looking pained, and Ryan was sounding evasive. But Ryan said, forcing himself to look Julia full in the face: “No. We do not.”

  “If someone broke into our house, he wouldn’t find a gun? He couldn’t use it against us? Is this true?”

  “Julia, this is true.”

  She went away shaken, seeing the expression in his face.

  She had already searched the house, Ryan’s part of the house, desk-drawers, high closet shelves, shelves in remote areas of the basement. She had found nothing—no gun.

  Yet she knew—He is betraying me. He is abandoning me. And there is nothing I can do.

  AND THEN SHE DISCOVERED—the husband was withdrawing money from their joint banking accounts. There were mysterious expenditures—$1,200, $4,600, $17,000. A singularly large withdrawal—$58,000.

  Of course, Ryan had explanations. When Julia inquired.

  He’d transferred money from one account to another, or—he’d purchased bonds that yielded a “higher rate of interest than we were getting.” He could provide figures, he could be utterly convincing. Julia listened, and a pulse beating in her head warned her—He is preparing to leave you. He is stealing from you. Don’t trust him!

  It did seem that Ryan was startled by her curiosity. By even her awareness of their finances. For Julia had rarely shown the slightest interest in money, she’d entrusted to the husband virtually all of what she’d called money matters. It had been a measure of her femininity, in a way.

  Also, Ryan told her he’d been giving donations—“in both our names”—to several charitable organizations.

  Ryan rummaged through a desk-drawer to show her several thank-you letters and documents of receipt. These were for smaller funds—$800, $1,000. Julia only glanced at them, embarrassed. She felt so foolish, doubting the husband.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have co-signed the cards.”

  “I’m sure that I did tell you, Julia. Around January first. You usually tell me to ‘use my own judgment’—so that’s what I did.”

  Ryan spoke evenly, with an edge of impatience. Since he’d struck her several weeks before—(by “reflexive” accident, as he’d claimed)—there was a precarious tenderness between them as if both were convalescents. The checks were to Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, New Jersey Hospice. Others were names new to Julia. Figures swirled in Julia’s head, she made no effort to add them up, the husband was so convincing.

  Saying, in a chiding voice: “These are all very good causes, Julia. We have to do something meaningful with our God-damned money.”

  SOMEHOW IT HAD HAPPENED, the husband and the wife had had a child together. Out of their young bodies, a son named Patrick.

  The son had become an adult and lived several thousand miles away in Southern California where he, too, though in a way very different from his research-scientist father, worked in that indeterminate zone betwe
en “biology” and “commerce.” The son had become an entity shared by the husband and the wife of whom they could speak at any time in their special, private way of speaking of their son, which was an (intimate, inviolable) bond between them.

  For approximately twenty years the son had been their single most obsessive subject of conversation—how bizarre that seemed to them, now.

  For Patrick was gone from them now, irrevocably. Strange and unsettling to think of the son as an adult man, thirty-three years old; a man who had not only his own, private and secretive life but was involved in the lives of others totally unknown to the parents, a divorced woman (Hispanic judging by the name: Diaz) and her two young children who lived in San Diego, California. In this new alliance, which was in fact an alliance of more than a few years, utterly peripheral to the lives of Patrick’s parents, Patrick was ever more distant to them. He’d taken on the emotional and financial responsibility of a family Julia and Ryan called ready-made, non-returnable from which they knew themselves excluded.

  Ready-made grandchildren did not greatly excite them. Especially Ryan.

  Patrick had left them at the age of eighteen and had returned only sporadically since. The more successful a son, the less you will see him. They took pride in this fact, and a kind of grudging pleasure. They understood that Patrick would never again return as the son of their household; he would never again be their child. Those years he’d loved his mother, even adored her—all that was finished. The precious years of Julia’s mothering.

  When Patrick had first left for Stanford Julia had wept for days. There’d been something savage and unspeakable in her grief. She’d wanted to think that it was an exceptional grief and that she could not survive the loss of her mothering but of course she survived, as everyone had assured her she would. She’d learned to laugh at herself, eventually. She’d thought—Each death is laughable, maybe. All that is required is perspective.

  Now, there were days when Julia had to remind herself that she’d been—she was—a mother. And that she and the husband had created a child out of their young, ardent bodies, as a flame had whipped through those bodies pitilessly.

  Wistfully she said to the husband, “Well—ready-made grandchildren are better than no grandchildren. Don’t you think?”

  Ryan said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  THE HURT WAS a bruise you longed to press, to establish that it is a bruise, and that its hurt is natural.

  She was waiting for him to love her again. To discover her, as he’d discovered her forty-five years before. A lifetime!

  Don’t leave me. Don’t go away. Where are you going?

  In terror she woke in her bed, such thoughts churning in her brain. And there was the husband to console her, sharply speaking her name.

  He was a master of sudden, emergency situations. At times, like one captured in a spotlight, he was kindly, patient, placating, wise. In the way of a healer he called her Julia, Julie. He called her darling.

  “It’s only a dream, darling.”

  Sleepily admonishing her, “Whatever it was, just forget it. Dreams are nothing but vapor.”

  HE LEFT THE HOUSE calling out to her G’bye! He made no effort to know if she heard him, in another part of the house.

  Quickly and in stealth one day she followed him, as she’d planned.

  She took care to keep her car a discreet distance behind his station wagon.

  The husband in the station wagon. The wife in a smaller vehicle.

  He drove at a moderate speed in just the direction she’d have predicted. At the pharmaceutical company approximately seven miles away he turned into the driveway as she’d predicted. The wife told herself—You see? There is nothing. The wife returned home by a circuitous route taking her through Creekside Park where she saw few dogs, and those dogs on leashes. It saddened her that the DOG MISSING posters had become frayed, rain-lashed.

  She wondered if “Gem” had been found, or if his owners had simply given up the search. She’d lost the tiny slip of paper with the telephone number.

  SHE THOUGHT Is he moving out? Going to live with—who?

  It was painful to think that just possibly the husband had another family, not so far away. You heard of such things. You were mildly shocked, or you were amused, but you were not terribly surprised for such things happened, and were not considered exceptional. There was another, younger family in north Jersey perhaps. The husband had chosen another wife, a woman young enough to be their daughter, whom he’d met in his lab, a younger biologist, a lab technician, possibly someone on the clerical staff, and Ryan was departing soon to live with this young family for he would be a doting father to the young woman’s children. (Julia did not want to think that Ryan had fathered young children, himself.) In weak moments Julia thought—Take me with you! Don’t leave me alone. The young wife might be lonely for her own mother, who’d died of breast cancer, or worse yet pancreatic cancer, swept off the surface of the whirling Earth.

  No, that was ridiculous. The young wife would not want her. She was so weak thinking of these things, she could barely stand. She poured red wine into a glass, and not a clean glass, and drank. The man—the husband—(sometimes she was forgetting his name, but she knew exactly who he was)—had been the one to introduce Julia to wine, to the ceremony of drinking wine slowly, savoring each mouthful, when she’d been a girl of nineteen. That warm astonishing sensation running through her throat, into her chest, belly, groin . . . That sensation of almost unbearable longing, she felt still, so many years later, though the object of the longing held himself teasingly from her, at a little distance.

  Out of that sensation of longing, the child had been conceived.

  Out of such longing, all of life—raw, grasping, blind—is conceived.

  To her surprise she saw: their stock of wine was depleted, considerably. Where once there’d been too many bottles in the lower cupboard to have easily counted, now there were but a few. She thought—Have we been celebrating? What have we been celebrating? She could not recall the last time they’d drunk wine together, seriously together, on the rear deck of their house in summer.

  Only dimly could she recall wine-sweetened kisses. Long ago their quiet laughter, caresses. Her fingers in the husband’s hair, his strong spread fingers against the small of her back.

  My love. You have made me so happy.

  IN THE NIGHT she wakened with the realization—Of course!

  The husband slept beside her, turned from her and facing the dark of the bedroom. No idea of what the wife had guessed.

  This time she followed him in her car along the country highway at a discreet distance as before, and when he turned his station wagon into the entrance of the pharmaceutical research headquarters she continued to drive along the road, at a slow speed; within a few minutes, she saw the husband’s station wagon reappear, from another driveway, leading back onto the road. Shrewdly the husband had simply driven through the grounds of the pharmaceutical company, which covered a number of acres. Now, the husband was driving at a higher speed.

  Another six miles into town. He was meeting someone there, she knew.

  Unexpectedly the husband turned into the vast grounds of the medical center and hospital, that had been newly built and opened within the year. Where was Ryan going? Had he an appointment there, about which he hadn’t told his wife?

  Julia felt a clutch of surprise, and alarm. She thought—Or maybe he’s visiting someone in the hospital. Doesn’t want me to know.

  A woman, possibly. A new, young woman. Or an older love. Someone he’d never told Julia about, to spare her. Or, someone in his family who had never cared for the wife.

  Someone who was ill? How seriously ill?

  She parked behind the medical center. There was Ryan’s station wagon not far away. She believed it was Ryan’s station wagon though the late morning sun blazed and blinded her and she could not decipher the license plate. She tried, rubbing at her eyes. But she could not. An
d she’d arrived too late to see which entrance the husband had taken into the massive building.

  It was like their old days of bicycling—Ryan ahead, and almost out of sight; Julia behind, pedaling furiously, panting and resentful. Where had he gone! He couldn’t have known that she was following him—could he?

  Her senses were alert, her heart was beating rapidly. She wondered if hunters felt this way. There was something raw and carnal in it, the pursuit of prey.

  He would be furious if he knew.

  But he would know then, how I love him.

  The medical center was attached to the hospital though it was only three floors, and the hospital, seven. You walked through a large atrium-foyer, and followed corridors arranged like spokes, each clearly designated. The medical center/hospital resembled a hive that thrummed with life, and much of it not-visible to the visitor’s eye. Tile floors gleamed underfoot, ceilings were high, provoking a sensation of vertigo. Julia was feeling short of breath. “Please! I need to see him, so badly. My husband.” In the near distance she did see Ryan, or thought she saw Ryan—each time, the man turned out to be a stranger. And once, the man turned out to be a woman, big-boned and tall with very short-cut, taffy-colored hair flat against her head.

  Much of the ground floor of the medical center was Radiology. There was a dispiriting familiarity to the very name—Radiology. Julia had had numerous mammograms in the old medical center as well as, over the years, C-scans and MRIs. Her medical history swam up at her, a glimmering-white shark beneath a sea green surface. She turned away, she shut her eyes. But this visit was not about her.

  She took up her cell phone and called the husband’s cell phone number. The little ringing went unanswered until Ryan’s voice mail switched on.

  Was he here? Somewhere? The medical pavilion, as it was called, contained a dizzying variety of doctors, specialists—Internal Medicine, Gynecology & Obstetrics, Respiratory, Dermatology, Asthma Clinic, Pediatrics, Oncology, Neurology, Eating Disorders.