Jack of Spades

by Oates, Joyce Carol

  At such times, so taken by surprise, it requires some seconds before I recognize Irina, my dear wife. More than once I’ve been concerned that, when Irina has shaken me to wake me from sleep, I’ve had an impulse to shove her away.

  Already I was plotting how to keep this upsetting news from Irina, and from my family. I did not want to think that any “hearing” in the Harbourton Municipal Court must be publicly accessible, and might be reported in the Harbourton Weekly.

  The phone rang. Eagerly I answered thinking it might be a repentant Ms. Flaherty, taking pity on me, calling back with helpful information, but instead it was Irina, on the downstairs extension, asking if something was wrong.

  “Wrong? What could be wrong, darling? I’ve been having some difficulty with this new novel—that’s all.”

  And it was so. I’d been having difficulty preventing my new mystery from continually metamorphosing into a more complicated, even imbricated structure than I’d planned, which I knew to be imprudent given the restrictions of the mystery genre. The title was Criss-Cross and its structure had been meant to be simple: a contrasting of “hero” and “villain” in alternating chapters until, in the final chapter, the “hero” prevails over the “villain.” Readers of this genre have every right to expect that a contract of some implicit sort exists between them and the mystery authors—that “evil” will be punished sufficiently, and the usual chaos of the world will be radically simplified, to allow for an ending that is both plausible and unexpected.

  Those intellectual-literary snobs who mock the restrictions of our genre—(including even dear Julia, whom I adore)—would find it very difficult to replicate a successful mystery themselves: one in which evil is pursued until it has been captured, and dealt with; and in which there is a clear and unambiguous ending.

  The endings of Jack of Spades’s mysteries were crueler, as they were more primitive. There was too much evil spilling over everything to be tidily mopped up and mostly, everybody died, or rather was killed. Often I had no idea how a novel by Jack of Spades would end until the last chapter which came rushing at me like a speeding vehicle; mysteries by Andrew J. Rush were models of clarity carefully outlined months in advance, and rarely surprised the author.

  This was good. For the author, as for my readers. No one likes surprises, essentially.

  Irina was asking if I wanted her to come up to my study, if I was feeling anxious, and I thanked her but told her no, that wasn’t necessary. There was only one cure for anxiety—work.

  By dinnertime, I told her, I’d have worked myself out of the morass I was in. As I always did.

  “If you’re sure, Andrew . . . You know, you had another bad night last night.”

  I don’t think so.

  “Well—I seem to remember . . .”

  Not at all, Irina. But thanks! Love you.

  And I hung up, before the murmured echo Love you.

  It was like my dear wife, I thought, to exaggerate. Irina had thought she’d overheard my uplifted voice just now, and she’d misinterpreted my mood. She seemed to have misremembered the previous night, which had been featureless as a dark, placid sea in which the turbulence of waves is indecipherable.

  Such wifely solicitude is tender, when it is not exasperating!

  In my fingers was a glass of wine—(tart white wine, my ­favorite)—which I hadn’t remembered pouring.

  4 The Accusation

  “God damn.”

  Of course, I could not work! My heart was beating rapidly and my breathing felt constrained as if something, or someone, were tightening a band around my chest.

  Impulsively then, though I should have known better, I decided to call C. W. Haider. Any lawyer would have advised me not to try to communicate with this individual who’d accused me—(fraudulently, crazily)—of theft; but of course, I could not resist trying to appeal to his sense of justice and fair play. I could not resist thinking, with childish vanity—But he will like me, when he hears my voice. Everyone likes Andy Rush!

  There appeared to be no “C. W. Haider” listed in the Harbourton directory but there were several Haiders living in town, on older, historic streets near the town square. No one answered the first two calls, but the third was answered on the second ring, by an individual with a bright expectant voice who might have been a precocious child, or a mildly retarded adult—“Yes-ss? Hel-lo?”

  I asked if I might speak to “C. W. Haider” and the voice responded brightly, “You are! You are speaking to ‘C. W. Haider.’”

  A child! Or, a woman posing as a child.

  Awkwardly I introduced myself. As I uttered “Andrew J. Rush” it seemed to me that I could hear an intake of breath at the other end of the line.

  “I’m calling to inquire about a summons I received today from the Harbourton Municipal Court. ‘C. W. Haider’—which you say is you—has filed a complaint with the court accusing me of theft. But I don’t understand what the ‘theft’ could be, Ms. Haider. (It is ‘Ms. Haider’—isn’t it?) Are you actually claiming that I took something from you, when you must know we’ve never met?”

  Silence. Again, a sound of breathing, close against the phone receiver.

  “Hello? Is this—Ms. Haider? Are you there?”

  Now the voice came in a low childish sly drawl—“Yes-ss.”

  “You’ve charged me with theft, you’ve issued a complaint with the municipal court, will you please explain why? What is it I’m supposed to have stolen from you?”

  “You know.”

  “I know—what?”

  “You know what you took, Mr. Rush.”

  The voice was louder now, sharper and not so childish.

  “No. I don’t. I don’t know ‘what I took’—I don’t know who the hell ‘C. W. Haider’ is, or anything about you. I think you owe me the courtesy of an explanation, at least.”

  “Well, it has to stop. It has gone on too long, and now I am putting a stop to it. The judge will help me put a stop to it.”

  The voice lifted in shrill protest. You could imagine the eyes shining with indignation and hurt.

  “A stop to what?”

  “You know, Mr. Rush. You know what you are doing to me.”

  “But what is it that I’m doing?”

  “Stealing from me. The pages you took, for your novels. The things that are mine, that you took. You are a plagi-a-rist—a plagiarist. I will expose you to the world.”

  “‘Stealing’—‘plagiarist’—you’re accusing me of plagiarism? That’s outrageous.”

  “It is outrageous! It is! That is why you will be exposed, and punished! I want the things you have stolen returned, and I want you to apologize. And you owe me money—royalties.”

  “Is this a joke? Are you someone I know?”

  “Yes! I am someone you know—I am someone you have been stealing from.”

  “But—how is this possible? Stealing what? How?”

  “Out of my house. You have been stealing out of my house, and it has to stop, and it will stop.”

  “But—this isn’t true! I don’t know you, or where you live—I don’t have any idea what you are talking about. ‘Pages’—‘novels’ . . .”

  “The judge will punish you, on Monday! You will see, then. All of the world will see, then. Thief! Plagi-a-rist! They will vilify you.”

  The woman gave a wild little cry, a burst of childish laughter. The line went dead.

  She is mad. Madness.

  Nothing to do with you.

  Call a lawyer. Do not become involved.

  Dazed, disbelieving. For a long time I stood at an octagonal window in my study, staring into the distance—(the grassy meadow, a fleeting view of Mill Brook on the farther side of the road)—without seeming to see anything. My thoughts beat like great deranged wings. Vilify, she’d said. The word stung. They will vilify you.

 
Plagi-a-rist. A worse word.

  Just kill her. Silence the voice, the threat will go away.

  Through the millennia, that has been the most effective strategy.

  Jack of Spades would not hesitate. Jack of Spades had a ready solution for any problem.

  5 The Good Citizen

  “It has to be a misunderstanding. Why would she select me.”

  With a part of my mind I understood that “C. W. Haider” was mentally ill, and that this bizarre accusation had nothing to do with “Andrew J. Rush” personally; yet with another part of my mind I felt threatened as if physically under siege.

  I had never been accused of any crime before, nor even any misdemeanor. Through my life of more than five decades, I’d accumulated, perhaps, less than a half-dozen parking and speeding tickets.

  I had never been sued. I had never been “arrested.”

  I had never been served a summons. A subpoena.

  Wanting to protest to C. W. Haider: I am a good person! I am a person who loves his family, and I am a citizen who cares about his community.

  I am a person whom others respect, admire, love.

  I am not a petty criminal.

  I am not a plagiarist!

  You will not vilify me!

  It was in 1998 that Irina and I made the decision to buy Mill Brook House, as it’s called. A somewhat overgrown, just-slightly-shabby but beautiful eleven-acre property north of the village of Harbourton within view of meandering Mill Brook.

  We bought the property, or rather made a down payment and acquired a mortgage, with money from the sales of my first several novels. We were not rich—hardly!—but suddenly, it seemed that we had money, we could afford to live on a scale we’d never have anticipated when I began writing and sending out my work with the blind optimism of a man fishing with a half-dozen lines.

  Until then we’d been living in a small ranch-style house in suburban New Brunswick where I taught English at Highland Park High School, and Irina was a Montessori instructor. Humdrum is the word that comes to mind—though I try to beat it away as you’d beat away a loud-buzzing fly it is humdrum that comes to mind most ignominiously.

  Humdrum lives for humdrum folks.

  Before Jack of Spades emerged out of Nowhere.

  Often we visited my parents in Harbourton forty miles to the west and south, where I’d been born and grown up and still had—still have—many friends from childhood. Humdrum life too it had been there—probably—but my memories are happy ones, overall. My father was a small-town merchant (footwear, ladies’ handbags) who did moderately well in the context of other Harbourton merchants and who never complained of his life though when I was a boy of about thirteen, seeing Dad’s store on Main Street, one glass-fronted facade among others, each showcasing merchandise to the street, a dizzying realization came to me: What if no one buys? Suddenly—from now on—no one?

  There is terror in such a realization, when you are thirteen.

  It is not the terror of split skulls, spilled blood, death. It is the humdrum terror of ordinary life.

  Did I say that I had a happy childhood? In interviews, this is so.

  It is often the case that an only child has a happy childhood because there are no rivals for his parents’ love.

  North of Harbourton is rolling farmland, beautiful countryside bordering Mill Brook and long the property of wealthy landowners, multi-millionaire retired businessmen and politicians. For those of us who grew up in Harbourton it was a romantic dream to someday buy one of the old country estates along Mill Brook.

  But—can we afford it? Irina asked.

  We can afford it, darling! I promise you.

  We spent more than a year renovating the eighteenth-century farmhouse with its small rooms, slanted plank floors, and unnervingly steep, narrow staircases. The original cellar was earthen-floored, with an oppressive, low ceiling; many of the windows were ill-fitting, and the house was prohibitively expensive to heat. We added rooms, we built a guest wing. In a room adjacent to the living room, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, I began to collect favorite books of mine in their earliest editions, when I could find them: American mystery and detective fiction of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s; a miscellany of pulp magazines containing “weird tales” of H. P. Lovecraft; first or early editions of books by Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Robert W. Chambers, Richard Matheson; ghost stories by Henry James and Edith Wharton; science fiction of a philosophical nature by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard; a solid wall of mid- and late-twentieth-century contemporaries from A to Z, through Barker, King, Le Guin, Morrow, Straub . . .

  My writing room, which has been featured in the New York Times Style Magazine as well as in New Jersey Life, is on the second floor of the farmhouse, in an extension built over the garage (formerly a stable). This light-filled room has skylights and windows overlooking a grassy decline to a large pond on which waterfowl—(mallards, Canada geese, swans)—languidly paddle. Beyond is a deciduous forest, which is part of our property; beyond that, just visible from my study, the gray-blue curve of Mill Brook. At a draftsman’s table in this room I compose my novels on a computer, working with hand-scrawled notes; on the wall beside the table I affix maps, plot outlines, hand-drawn likenesses of my “characters,” chronological lists. For I am a meticulous plotter of mysteries—even those readers who dislike my novels for their inevitable upbeat endings have to concede that no one plots mystery novels more conscientiously than Andrew Rush.

  On a windowsill facing the draftsman’s table are my magical talismans—family pictures, my Edgar first novel award, mementos and good-luck charms.

  In a small refrigerator, quick-energy supplies: orange juice, almond-yogurt bar, Diet Coke, white wine.

  I am so happy here.

  Here is my soul.

  You will not dare separate me from my soul.

  On the farther side of the room facing a smaller window is a smaller table, reputedly an antique, curiously scarred as if with a penknife, bought from a local Mill Brook Valley dealer. It is on this table that I compose my “Jack of Spades” novels first by hand, on yellow legal paper; then, when I have accumulated several chapters, I bring the material to the draftsman’s table to type into the computer.

  File: J.S.

  Writing as “Jack of Spades,” I write very quickly, and rarely glance back. Unlike “Andrew J. Rush,” I don’t plot carefully at all—I scarcely think in terms of plot.

  One thing happens, and then another.

  And another.

  And then—there’s a (nasty) surprise.

  Writing as “Jack of Spades” I rarely write before midnight. When the rest of the house is darkened. When I am totally alone, and not likely to be interrupted. When the tartest of white wines won’t do the trick and a few ounces of Scotch whiskey tastes very good—very good.

  “Jack of Spades” is my reward for having written a minimum of ten to twelve pages on my own novel—that’s to say, the novel that will next appear under the name “Andrew J. Rush.”

  If I postpone writing as “Jack of Spades” until the early hours of the morning, I can assume that my energy won’t flag as it inevitably flags writing as “Andrew J. Rush.”

  Wild ride. Roller coaster.

  And suddenly—the tracks have vanished in midair.

  Sometimes I find myself back in Catamount Park. Where when you were a kid you hid your fear of the roller coaster and the high diving board at the quarry. And other things.

  Catamount Park is a state park in Far Ridge, about an hour’s drive from Myrtle Street, Harbourton, where we lived at the time.

  When we were boys. Brothers.

  At the quarry, climbing the clay-colored misshapen boulders to the rocky promontory above the water. There, the high diving board.

  There were two diving boards at the quarry:
the higher, the lower. The more daring, the less daring. One for older boys, one for younger boys. Children, girls, most adults swam in the “safe” part of the quarry. Teenaged boys, guys in their twenties and older guys who were practiced swimmers and show-off divers clambered over the boulders to get to the rocky promontory that was the highest point.

  Younger boys were not always welcome. Depending upon who was there, and what time of day.

  And in the near distance, tinkly music from the merry-go-round. Cries and laughter from the roller coaster.

  Some of us (boys) were obsessed with the (higher) diving board.

  “Andrew? Is something wrong?”

  It was Irina, behind me.

  I did not turn—not at once. Though I had not heard Irina approach me the hairs on the nape of my neck had begun to stir in apprehension.

  “I thought I heard someone talking. Unless it was a TV turned up high.”

  No TV. Not here.

  My dear wife had wakened at 2:35 A.M. and saw that I hadn’t come to bed and so went to look for me and found me in my study in a far wing of the house seated at the scarred antique desk with a single lamp burning, wholly absorbed in writing—writing rapidly, by hand, on the legal pad.

  Trying to remain calm, calmly smiling, yes and smiling with my eyes as well as my mouth—“Irina! Why aren’t you asleep, darling?”

  “I was asleep, Andrew. I went to bed at eleven. But—I’ve been missing you.”

  Irina came forward, hesitantly. She was in a silky beige nightgown, and barefoot. Her body seemed attenuated, flattened. The soft slack small breasts, the just discernibly protuberant stomach. Her short, dark-blond, graying hair was matted on one side of her head. In the wan light her face appeared pale and insubstantial as a paper mask, faintly lined. Beneath her concerned eyes, shadows like smudges.

  Wife, mother, helpmeet. It is good of you to love her.

  But why do you love her? Is she not one of those who have worn out your love?

  A wife is an emotional parasite. You are the parasite’s host.