Lovely, Dark, Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Any of what?

  I don’t know—pictures of her. The stained dress, and this old geezer pawing her, who’d been some old lover of her mother’s.

  Did Uncle Jayson ever know?

  About what, the old guy?

  No, the tattoo.

  I guess maybe. But he never saw it with his own eyes.

  He didn’t see the body?

  Sure Uncle Jayson saw the body—in the funeral home in Chilmark. But you couldn’t see the tattoo in the coffin, obviously.

  He didn’t come into the city to identify her . . .

  Are you kidding? You know Uncle Jayson—he more or less fell apart when he got the news. They shipped the body to the funeral home.

  Oh God that’s sad. So soon after Brook’s wedding . . .

  Jody came with me to do the ID at the hospital morgue. Nobody seemed to know what the hell was going on. Who was in charge. Worst fucking hour of our lives, that’s for sure.

  THEY’D TAGGED HER probable druggie, overdose.

  Seeing the dilated eyes rolled back in her head. Not-quite-healed tattoo on her back exposed by a clammy-sweaty T-shirt that had pulled off her shoulder.

  In this part of Manhattan even on a “good” street—West Tenth at Fifth Avenue—it wasn’t uncommon to answer such calls. In the Magdalen Hospital ER nights in summer, many such calls. Overdose, panic.

  Usually the caller wasn’t alone. Maybe this one had had a friend with her, a druggie-companion. He, or she, might’ve left before the girl began to OD. Might’ve fled.

  Summer nights half the population out on the streets and half of this population drunk or high or both, you were quick to identify such calls and even before blood work you were rarely mistaken.

  This one’s 911 calls were incoherent, bizarre. Had to be tripping.

  By the time they’d arrived at 44 West Tenth, #3B, at 11:39 P.M., August 9, the girl had passed out. She’d had the presence of mind to unlock her door. Three medics had rushed up the stairs not wanting to take time waiting for the elevator and they’d found her on the floor just inside the door, pale-toffee skin, slutty black butterfly tattoo on her left shoulder, half-dressed, barefoot. She’d had a rich-girl look, even on the floor, sweaty and unconscious and a trail of vomit on her chin. Her hair was black, straight, disheveled. The apartment was sparely but stylishly furnished, nice things, oatmeal-colored sofa, black leather chairs, hardwood floors and small elegant woven rugs and framed photographs on the walls, conspicuously large black-and-white photographs of the quality you’d see in a museum. And there was an enormous state-of-the-art computer. And built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. And the small bedroom attractive too though the bed was unmade, the sheets churned-looking, and the adjoining bathroom was messy—damp towels on the floor, toilet seat up and a stink of vomit and a ceiling fan turned high. (No visible sign of drugs or paraphernalia only just Tylenol, ibuprofen, bottles of vitamins, herbal medications. But if she had junkie friends they might’ve panicked and taken away the evidence.) Must’ve been she’d staggered into the other room lost her balance and fell heavily onto the floor for you could see the beginning of a bruise, considerable swelling on her right knee, in the ER the knee would take on a grotesque appearance like a bulbous growth on the girl’s leg. Mixed-race female, blood pressure sixty-four over ninety-nine, almost no pulse, clammy skin, open and dilated eyes, estimated age early twenties, estimated weight one hundred pounds, estimated height five feet two inches, failure to respond, probable overdose. The small unresisting body that smelled of both vomit and urine they’d strapped to a stretcher bearing her skillfully down the stairs and to the ambulance at the curb with as much excited zeal as if she hadn’t been an artsy-druggie who’d brought this collapse on herself but an innocent young woman stricken by some mysterious illness or malaise that had caused her dilated eyes to roll back in her head, her opened mouth to be damp with spittle, her bladder to release urine and her skin to exude clammy sweat so she’d looked like she was covered in a fine scrim of grease.

  Heroin OD, want to bet?

  Nope.

  (OH GOD she’d said No—hadn’t she?)

  (Hadn’t even wanted to see Carroll after the wedding where she’d been made to feel ashamed. And there was Carroll calling Leanda on her cell at 9:00 P.M. even as she was climbing out of a taxi on West Tenth outside Leanda’s brownstone, uninvited.)

  (NEVER REGAINED FULL CONSCIOUSNESS in the ER where, 12:12 A.M., she was admitted thrashing and writhing in the throes of a probable drug overdose. Oxygen mask attached. After some difficulty with her small veins blood was drawn but the vials may have been mislabeled, or misplaced. IV tube in her sallow-skinned arm she’d been tied to the gurney so she couldn’t pull out the needle and injure herself. Given a powerful sedative and wheeled to a post-op room to wait for lab results. Soon then a new shift of medical workers came on duty. And most of the younger staff was new since the first of July—admitting resident, interns. By the time she was given an identity—Leanda Johnston, 27—after forty-eight hours, dehydrated, sinking blood pressure, cardiac arrhythmia, so powerful a sedative her organs shut down one by one, she’d lapsed into a deeper coma, and died.)

  THE FIRST THING WRONG but she hadn’t understood it would be the first in a sequence of things-wrong.

  Not the tattoo—(which, examining in a hand mirror reflecting a bedroom mirror, she’d stared at for long minutes at a time rapt in a sort of hypnotized dread—unless it was elation: the black butterfly was truly beautiful and yes, it was sexy)—but the wedding she’d been so anticipating. Or, maybe it had been the afternoon before the wedding, the long trek through glaring sun, beach grass and nettles to the Johnstons’ private beach on the Atlantic Ocean off Chilmark.

  Her father, shuffling with his foot in a cast, sweating, cursing, had needed her to help him walk. He hated to use a cane, he preferred to lean on his daughter, who was also carrying his camera and tripod. Alone of the little party Leanda hadn’t worn proper shoes, only just sandals, and she’d been bare-legged, though she’d been warned about ticks.

  Deer ticks, not the other kind. Deer ticks are so little they’re the size of a pencil point. You don’t see them, that’s the problem. They burrow deep and they infect you and if you’re unlucky you don’t feel the pain of the infection.

  News of deer tick “infestation” and Lyme disease “epidemic” on Martha’s Vineyard had the effect of making younger people rebellious for it was older people who obsessed about these matters. Even Leanda who was cautious by nature had quickly become tired of the subject by the early summer. The Johnstons’ next-door neighbors on Menemsha Cross Road who made a fetish out of showering twice a day washing every inch of their bodies with a rough-textured washcloth—Leanda’s aunt Elsie and uncle Davis, Carroll’s parents, who were convinced they’d just gotten infected with Lyme disease each time you saw them—Leanda’s mother Gabriele who’d stayed away from the island for much of the summer like a recluse in the perpetually-air-conditioned condo on Central Park South—and Gabriele’s friend Helene Yarburgh who’d claimed to have had Lyme disease resulting in semi-paralysis of her facial muscles though (it was said behind her back) it had really been a minor stroke Helene had had, she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.

  (Helene Yarburgh, a wealthy quasi-glamorous widow who lived in Edgartown, was notorious on the Island for an alleged love affair she’d had with William Styron twenty years before. When Helene had first seen Leanda, as a young adolescent, she’d blithely assumed that the mixed-race girl had to be an au pair, otherwise what would a Filipina be doing in the Johnstons’ house in Chilmark?)

  Jayson Johnston, Leanda’s father, now in his mid-seventies, was a paragon of carelessness in hygiene—Jayson ate food he’d dropped onto the floor, ate unwashed fruit, neglected to wash his hands even after using the bathroom. He laughed at his family’s insistence that he see his small team of doctors regularly and he’d continued to smoke after a lung-cancer scare in his fifties, he didn’t take precautions ag
ainst deer ticks when he went out tramping in the woods and through deep grass; and yet, he too obsessed over Lyme disease—“They say it eats your brain. Microscopic parasites.” When Leanda assisted her father, as she’d done intermittently for the past six years since graduating from college, she’d been astonished to observe at close hand how Jayson Johnston both revered and despised himself; how he’d seemed at times, in his heavy-drinking fugues, not to care if he lived or died.

  “Am I too old for you? Too old to be your God-damned Daddy?”—he’d taunted her, cruelly. “Maybe you think you’d have been better off with your ‘birth mother,’ eh?”

  Leanda had shook her head mutely. No Daddy.

  She had no idea who her birth mother was. She’d known as a very young child that the woman who called herself “Mummy” wasn’t her true mother as she wasn’t the mother of her sisters or her brother Casey—these were the children of previous Mrs. Johnstons, now departed. She’d known, because she was told so often, that she was special.

  “We picked you out, Leanda. No ‘pig in a poke’ with you!”

  She tried to see: a pig in a poke? Was a poke like a paper bag?

  Was she the little piggie, in the paper bag?

  The corners of Daddy’s eyes crinkled when he smiled so broadly, you understood you had to smile, too. Or Daddy would take offense.

  He’d had assistants, sometimes more than one, working for him. But Leanda had liked to be Daddy’s “assistant,” too. Sometimes he called her “my apprentice.” None of this was serious of course. Jayson Johnston’s serious photography required travel—Brazil, Patagonia, Antarctica, Africa, remote provinces in China and in the Australian outback. It was only in recent years, since his health had begun to fail, that Leanda’s father concentrated on subjects close at hand. Like his friend the late, distinguished photographer Paul Strand whom he’d known as a young man, he was now photographing trees, flowers, leaves, skies and moonlight just outside his door. These photographs were minimal, spare, modest in ambition, “poetic.” (On the walls of Leanda’s father’s house in Chilmark were a number of signed prints by such classic photographers as Brassaï, Alfred Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Minor White, Paul Strand. Of these, Strand’s Winter Garden, Great Vine in Death, and Things Passed on the Way to Oblivion, work of the early 1970s, were clearly models for Jayson Johnston’s newest work, which Leanda knew to be very beautifully composed but, she thought, sadly diminished, small in scale.)

  Retired to Chilmark, her father had been embittered and ironic at first, like a crippled giant; more recently, he was trying hard to adapt to the changed circumstances of his life. Leanda could never remember her father’s age—she thought it might be seventy-five.

  Or, seventy-six.

  Gamely Leanda had carried Jayson’s heavy Hasselblad for him on the island, the previous spring. His tripod. His backpack which contained bottles of Evian water and wheat germ bars as well as lenses. She was half his size. She was in reasonably good physical condition—but she wasn’t a hiker. In school, she’d been a slow cautious swimmer in the shallow end of the chlorinated pool. At sports she’d been hopeful and sometimes inspired but easily discouraged by aggressive competition, and soon breathless, fatigued. She’d been too small to take seriously. Not the last chosen for sports teams but next-to-last. The (adopted) Chinese-American girls had snubbed her, in their cool subtle way. In the Johnston household it was crucial to be a good sport, not to complain and above all not to weaken. Especially at their summer place where much of the time was spent outdoors. (Secretly, Leanda hated summers. She’d hated summers on Martha’s Vineyard where so much time had to be spent outdoors and where so much time was spent talking about weather, real estate, “new people,” threats to the Island.) At Squibnocket Point they’d tramped into the dunes. She’d crouched shivering in freezing April wind from the ocean as her father photographed shorebirds for hours—relentlessly, tirelessly. Astonishing to observe this frequently morose aging man quickened to life by the camera in his hands that were still steady, thrilled by the sight of herons, egrets, hawks, cranes, curlews, gulls—amazing, Jayson Johnston could identify herring gulls, laughing gulls, black-backed gulls, species of terns.

  She was the one to stagger in exhaustion. Though she was nearly a half-century younger than Jayson Johnston.

  The legendary Jayson Johnston! This was a joke not entirely a joke.

  But it was deer ticks she’d been thinking of, for some reason. What was the neurological disease they caused—Lyme disease? But why was she thinking of this?

  Recalling her handsome dark-tanned cousin Mitchie Johnston who went everywhere barefoot on the Island, driving his Jeep, hiking in dune grass, in hot sand. Fearlessly running into the crazed crashing waves that foamed at Leanda’s bare toes on the beach, freezing even when the sun was warm. Mitchie she’d been in love with—at a little distance—since she’d been twelve, and Mitchie had been sixteen. He’d appalled female relatives by blithely pulling ticks out of his skin with tweezers or burning them out with matches, wincing with pain but laughing.

  (But these hadn’t been deer ticks. The other species of tick, large enough so you could see them. Looking like tiny spiders. Very black, and very easy to detect against skin as pale and smooth as Leanda’s.)

  Mitchie hadn’t come to Brook’s wedding but he’d sent an e-mail video. Mitchie’d been traveling in Nepal, trekking with several companions and a Sherpa guide, making a documentary film.

  She hadn’t loved Mitchie Johnston in years. She rarely thought of him now except sometimes with Nick—shutting her eyes, as Nick touched her, caressed and kissed her, seeing then her dark-tanned cousin with surf crashing about his perfect boy-body, shielding his eyes from the sun, laughing at her.

  YOU’RE PRECIOUS TO ME, Leanda. You are the only child I chose, because you are special.

  Did Daddy really say these remarkable words? Or had she invented them? It almost didn’t matter which, in her delirium she could make no distinction.

  CARROLL HAD TEXTED just once, to ask how the tattoo was healing.

  Leanda had texted back Good! Thanks, C.

  In fact the tattoo didn’t seem to be healing as she’d been promised it would. Or (possibly) she’d misunderstood how quickly it would heal. That entire tattoo-episode—like much of the wedding—was a blur and a buzz in her head she preferred not to recall.

  She’d slipped away from the wedding party. She was sure no one noticed.

  And the tears on her silly hot face, like the old fool’s wine staining her beautiful silk shift, no one noticed.

  Brook hadn’t asked her youngest (half-) sister to be a bridesmaid. Diplomatically Brook had explained she’d wanted a “balance” between sisters/cousins and friends—it was certainly nothing personal.

  Of course, it was personal. Brook disliked Leanda.

  Though Leanda adored Brook, as she adored all her (half-) sisters, and her (half-) brother Casey, they disliked her.

  Or if they didn’t dislike her, they were indifferent to her which was worse.

  At family occasions Leanda was given to know—just know—that, if she hadn’t been present, if she hadn’t existed, essentially nothing would be changed in the gathering.

  Mummy had said sighing I tried. God knows I tried. She’s a sweet sad child she’s just not—you know.

  These not-quite-sober words she was sure she’d overheard. More than once.

  Just not—you know . . . My own daughter.

  Gabriele had had at least two miscarriages, Leanda had learned. If one of these pregnancies had come to term—Leanda wouldn’t have been brought into the family.

  Pig in a poke! That was exactly what Gabriele had wanted.

  Though she’d been involved at first in planning her stepdaughter’s wedding, and the party of nearly two hundred guests to be held at the Chilmark farm, Gabriele had claimed to feel too “stricken” by the heat to travel to the actual event. (This July, 2012, had been the hottest in recorded history in
New York City and New England.) Leanda knew that her father was furious though he was professing indifference.

  Brook had said she was disappointed, and hurt. At the Champagne party Jody had said with a giggle Oh come off it, Brook-ie! Why’d you or anybody else give a shit.

  This too, Leanda had pretended she hadn’t heard.

  Now she was safe from them. Now she’d fled the Vineyard and returned to her own place on West Tenth Street. She was at her computer trying to work the Photoshop program which was too complicated for her. Now, she did miss Nick!

  When she’d first started to feel sick, running a mild fever, and mildly sick to her stomach, and a mild headache—she attributed it to the computer, her long mostly frustrating and futile hours at the computer. And then, it had been just a few days after getting the tattoo and the tattoo was still sore, like a patch of burnt skin, and so she hadn’t thought Maybe it’s a tick bite, infected—for she was in Manhattan now, on West Tenth Street.

  Immediately she’d thought The tattoo.

  How impulsively she’d behaved! Nick criticized her for rarely behaving spontaneously which showed how little he knew of her, whom he claimed to love. Yet she’d behaved spontaneously the other night, impulsively.

  It was a reckless thing to have done. In the Johnston household such pop-culture gestures as getting a tattoo were signs, in most people, of imbecility, inferiority. Only a loser defiles her body, unless she’s a rock star which is different, but only barely. The summer fifteen-year-old Maggie had streaked her platinum-blond hair red, purple, green—no one had stopped talking about it.

  Getting a fever, nausea—this was an appropriate punishment for what Leanda had done. Knowing beforehand that it would be a mistake.

  Why had she trusted her cousin! She had to believe that Carroll had had a mischievous reason for coercing Leanda into defiling her body—(as her father would see it)—with a sleazy tattoo on her shoulder.