Jack of Spades

by Oates, Joyce Carol

  Coincidence? Had to be.

  Could not be.

  Here was a shock! On the lower-most bookshelf, a ravaged copy of my novel of 1991, Murder at Midnight. This had been one of those novels of mine that my publisher had hoped would be a “breakout” publication to propel Andrew J. Rush to the very top of the bestseller list; unfortunately this did not happen, though the novel lingered on the lower rungs of the list for several weeks, and sold well in paperback. It was distressing to discover that Haider had gone through the book with a red pen luridly annotating virtually every paragraph . . . This wholly original mystery of formerly conjoined twins, each believing the other had died after their surgical separation, I will swear was entirely my own; yet Haider seemed to have typed a thirty-page outline of a near-identical plot of a novel titled Murder at Dusk which she’d sent, with a “sample first chapter,” to a New York publishing house in April 1987—receiving back a form rejection slip.

  Yet more distressing, the New York publishing house was my own.

  The parallels between Murder at Midnight and Murder at Dusk were undeniable. In the last chapter of each, a “good” twin had triumphed over an “evil” twin—unless it was the reverse.

  I didn’t doubt that Haider had imagined this mystery story in 1987, years before I’d even begun writing my novel. But I had not stolen from it!

  No doubt Haider had read from Murder at Midnight and from Murder at Dusk in the courtroom, in her mocking voice. Out of mortification I had tried not to listen. Now a wave of shame swept over me, that Andrew J. Rush had been publicly shamed after all.

  In a drawer in Haider’s writing table was a bulging manila file containing letters from this publisher as well as other New York publishers, and from magazines (Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic) dating from the early 1970s. Most of the letters were brief, succinct paragraphs of form rejections—We are sorry to inform you . . . A few were personalized, and one, from a (female) editor at St. Martin’s Press, in 2003, included a handwritten postscript—This almost worked for me! Please send more.

  How hopeful Haider must have felt, receiving this letter! But it appeared to be the only one of its kind amid the deluge of formula rejections.

  There was another, deep drawer filled with manila folders—typed pages, outlines, sketches; line-drawings, family photos, newspaper clippings. The dank-toadstool odor of abject failure wafted from this drawer, leaving me faint. Desperately I slammed the drawer shut.

  I was feeling dazed, exhausted. I had not eaten since an early lunch, for my dear wife Irina had abandoned me for dinner, preferring to have her evening meal with her “colleagues”—­including the lanky jet-black-haired “Huang Lee.”

  A furry shape pushed against my legs with mock affection—the silky black Satan, nudging with his hard head. The cat’s loud purring seemed a kind of crude cat laughter.

  “But—I am innocent. Truly I did not ‘steal’ . . . plagiarize’ . . .”

  It was the black cat which I had to convince. The black cat staring at me with bemused eyes.

  I could not comprehend what I’d discovered—whether the eerily close parallels between Haider’s work and the work of her successful contemporaries were simply coincidental, or could not possibly be coincidental.

  “Poor woman! Always to have missed . . .”

  From a young age Haider had tried to be a writer; she’d had inspired ideas, brilliant ideas for mystery-horror novels, but had been (evidently) incapable of executing these ideas as others had, with enormous commercial success. Was Murder at Dusk really so inferior to Murder at Midnight?—I didn’t want to read the sample first chapter, to see.

  Scattered about the writer’s room were family photographs. It seemed clear that, even when she was young, C. W. Haider had not been an attractive person. As a child she’d virtually sneered at the camera. Her features were hawkish, peevish; even sitting for a formal photograph, she didn’t deign to smile. In a glaring-white graduation cap and gown (high school? college?) the aggressively homely girl stood stiff and unyielding with a look of pride; you could see that her faith in herself was fierce though (as it turned out) unfounded. In her early thirties she had certainly resembled Ayn Rand. Of course it had not helped Haider’s career that she was female, but not feminine. She’d hoped to break into a male-dominated field of popular American mystery-horror writing as few women have been able to do, and certainly not a woman writer who displayed the ego of a male writer.

  Perhaps if Haider been more attractive, or in some way more feminine, she might have convinced an editor to read her work seriously, and to help her revise it for publication. But that was not to be. No wonder the poor woman had gone mad.

  Don’t be softheaded. She hates you.

  Recall: you have immunity in this house.

  This was so. As Jack of Spades had perceived, I had a kind of immunity in this house in Tumbrel Place. Judge Carson (indeed, a friendly acquaintance of mine who might have recused himself from the case, but had not) had ruled, C. W. Haider’s case against Andrew J. Rush had been dismissed, and dismissed with obvious contempt. If she accused me of “stealing” from her ever again, she would be laughed out of court.

  Would Harbourton police listen to her? I doubted it.

  I had prevailed upon Elliot Grossman not to sue Haider but I had relented and allowed him to file for an injunction against her to prevent further harassment.

  Grossman had joked, “With this injunction, the old witch can’t harass you. But you could, if you were a vindictive person, harass her.”

  I hadn’t laughed. I told Grossman that wasn’t funny.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, Andrew. Just a joke.”

  “It isn’t funny. I’ve told you, the poor woman is mentally ill. Why would I want to ‘harass’ someone who is mentally ill?”

  I was so angry at Grossman, it was all I could do to stop from grinding my back teeth. Fortunately we were speaking on the phone and Grossman couldn’t see the expression on my face, which felt savage.

  Now, the conversation returned to me. You could, if you were a vindictive person, harass her.

  Well, I did not want to harass C. W. Haider. It was punishment enough for the overbearing woman that she was a total failure as a writer; that she’d had to be committed for psychiatric examination; and that she’d lost her case against me.

  I didn’t consider that removing a few of the precious rare books in Haider’s library constituted “harassment” of any kind. My reasoning was that Haider would (probably) never notice the books were missing. Nor did I consider my acquisition of the books “theft”—for the same reason.

  She owes you. You didn’t sue for legal fees.

  I decided to take a copy of Haider’s self-published The Glowering. She would certainly never miss this since she had a half-dozen copies on the shelf, and what a collector’s item it was in its own bizarre way.

  Not that I would keep this curious novella on one of the open shelves in my house. I would keep it in my special storage area in the basement with Jack of Spades.

  Before I left the house I looked for the security alarm. I know where such things are installed, usually in a closet; I intended to dismantle it, but saw that it was already dismantled. The Edwardian house at 88 Tumbrel Place had no security beyond locks on its doors and windows.

  In one of the shut-off rooms, I unlocked a corner window that Esdra would never notice. As a precaution, I unlocked a second window, in a parlor.

  In case I wanted to revisit the Haider residence—though certainly I had no intention of revisiting “the scene of the crime.”

  As I was about to leave I rapped on a window to indicate to Esdra that I was departing. The caretaker, still raking debris, smiled at me and touched his fingers to his forehead in a kind of salute. It was a gesture of camaraderie—the black servant and the white gentleman-visitor bonded in our wish to protect
the beleaguered C. W. Haider.

  Though I should have been excited by my new collector’s items I found myself feeling curiously deflated, anticlimactic, on my drive home.

  I’d removed my old glasses. I’d tossed away the grimy baseball cap. As I turned into the driveway and approached Mill Brook House I saw that Irina’s car was still gone though it had seemed to me I’d been away from home for a very long time.

  17 The Secret Library

  Days, weeks. Waiting.

  At first, I eagerly checked local news for reports of a burglary at the Haider house. Or any news of C. W. Haider.

  Had Haider been discharged from the hospital? Had she returned home? How had she reacted to the “gift” on her writing table, insolently signed Steve King?

  Maybe she’d been so insulted by this prank, she’d had a relapse. A second breakdown.

  I believed that, if Haider had died, there’d have been a prominent obituary in the Harbourton Weekly. But there was no obituary.

  Once, I dared to drive past 88 Tumbrel Place. I felt a powerful attraction to the gaunt, ugly Edwardian house with its aged bricks and storm-damaged trees. I hoped for a glimpse of the faithful caretaker at least, but I saw no one. And no one at any of the tall narrow windows facing the street.

  Don’t go inside now. You would be risking too much.

  As if I needed Jack of Spades to caution me.

  “Esdra? Hello . . .”

  At the Harbourton Mall, in the parking lot behind Macy’s there came at a brisk pace a short squat blunt-headed black man in work clothes, and the sight of him so excited me, though I could see (certainly, I could see) that this man was much younger than Esdra Staples, I braked my car to a stop, and leaned out the window to call to him; but the man was a stranger, his eyes on me were startled, wary.

  “Sorry, sir! Mistook you for an old friend.”

  Damn.

  Out of caution, I had to hide my precious new acquisitions in the converted fruit cellar, in the special storage space where Jack of Spades resided in the basement of Mill Brook House. Though none of the books was identified as having belonged to Haider—nothing so vulgar as a book plate in a rare book, certainly!—I could not—yet—risk keeping my extraordinary signed books—Frankenstein, The Lair of the White Worm, The Turn of the Screw, In a Glass Darkly, The Island of Dr. Moreau—and the unique Imp of the Perverse—amid my upstairs collection where they might be perused by admiring visitors, though there was nothing I’d have liked better.

  Yet you left Dracula behind. Fool.

  This did nag at me. Why hadn’t I slipped the signed Dracula into my duffel bag when I’d had the opportunity? If Haider failed to notice the other missing books, she wouldn’t notice the absence of Dracula either.

  The converted fruit cellar was a windowless room—of course. I’d painted it myself: beige walls, white ceiling. Though the ceiling was low at about six feet, scarcely two inches above my head, the space was oddly comforting, as it was snug and secret. Each wall was comprised of bookshelves but partly filled; for Jack of Spades was still in the ascendency of his career. I would leave shelves empty, to be filled in time. But the new, rare books were prominently placed at eye level, on a shelf of their own.

  Now that valuable rare books were to be kept in the secret library (as I’d come to think of the room) I’d installed a dehumidifier, as I had a dehumidifier upstairs. (I’d discovered that the Frankenstein volumes alone were worth more than seventy-five thousand dollars!) It was my reasoning that if/when something happened to C. W. Haider, and there was no possibility of the books being traced to her, I would bring them upstairs to be proudly displayed.

  When I entered the secret library I could lock the door behind me, and feel utterly safe. Even when the children were still living in this house they’d rarely taken any interest in their father’s book-collecting just as (I’m sorry to say) they’d rarely taken much interest in their father’s writing career.

  Once, in fifth grade, our older son, Chris, had come home from school (at that time in Highland Park) to ask Irina—“Does Dad write ‘middle-brow mysteries’?” We’d laughed together at the question, and the prejudice behind it, but in truth, I had not thought it was funny. (Never mind what sly, circuitous revenge I’d enacted upon the unsuspecting snob of a fifth-grade teacher, who’d soon had to send his résumé out upon shark-infested waters, in search of another teaching job. Smug bastard!)

  Julia had read several mysteries by her daddy, in high school. She’d claimed to find them “real page-turners” and “filled with surprises” but (I happened to know) she’d ceased reading my books as an undergraduate at Brown, and seemed mildly embarrassed when anyone asked her if her father was the Andrew J. Rush. (“You should be proud of your father, Julia!” Irina chided her; and Julia said, “Well, I am, Mom—I just feel kind of self-conscious when people ask me because I don’t actually know what they think about Dad.”)

  As for the boys—Chris wasn’t much of a reader of fiction, by his own admission; and Dale, by his own admission, wasn’t much of a reader of anything. Both were “in computers”—medium-range jobs in medium-range companies in New Jersey. In their mid-twenties both our sons played video games for “relaxation.”

  So far as I knew, Irina read everything by Andrew J. Rush. Her reactions were always highly positive. What had become of the sharp-eyed, astute critic of our fiction workshop of years ago? Had my dear wife adjusted her critical expectations downward, to a comfort-level appropriate to Andrew J. Rush? Was my dear wife condescending?

  None of them knew anything about Jack of Spades. I smiled to think how shocked my family would be, if they knew.

  Yes but they won’t. That is our secret.

  Jack of Spades seemed new in my life, and so it was a surprising fact that a fifth novel by Jack of Spades was due to appear in a few weeks, in October. Utter secrecy would surround this publication, though the publisher planned some minimal advertisements, or had vaguely promised some advertisements. The new novel was Scourge, which I’d written in such a protracted siege of concentration the previous winter, I could barely recall the plot now; where each sentence by Andrew J. Rush was an effort, and felt at times as if I were dragging mangled veins and arteries out of my body to impress upon a blank page, entire passages and pages, even chapters, by “Jack of Spades” passed in a rabid blur leaving me exhausted, but gratified. My recollection of Scourge was that it had an abrupt, ugly ending, an unexpected murder-suicide in some murky waters, below a steep precipice; as usual, the Jack of Spades protagonist was confronted by a mocking Doppelganger who threatened his wife, his family, and himself, and had to be dispatched by violence.

  Bound galleys of Scourge, sent to my post office box in Hadrian, were on a shelf here, adjacent to paperbacks by Jack of Spades. Out of curiosity I checked the cover, which I’d forgotten—it was something of a shock, to see that the cover art for Scourge crudely replicated a familiar Gustav Klimt erotic portrait of a sexually voracious woman. (Had I given permission for this? Evidently!) In the original Klimt the nude female had vivid red hair springing from her head while on the book cover the nude female had snowy-white hair though there was no mistaking her avid sexuality. In both, the nude female was lying in a suggestive pose, hands behind her head and arms spread to expose patches of underarm hair.

  Sick. Macho-male.

  Novels to make you think—but not nice thoughts.

  I wondered if Julia had read more novels by Jack of Spades. It was irritating to me, that my daughter was so headstrong, and so stubbornly feminist. I hated to think of her as a “mature” young woman living her own, inscrutable life—hated to think of her as sexually involved with anyone . . .

  “Hello? Andrew?”—a voice behind me, unexpectedly.

  It was Irina. I’d left the door to the secret library ajar, and Irina was standing just outside.

  “Why, what is this? A kind
of—underground library?”

  Until now, Irina hadn’t seen the “storage room”—though I’d told her that I was using the space for surplus books. Her widened eyes suggested how surprised she was, seeing the built-in shelves, the recessed lighting, a single black leather easy chair, even a rug on the floor.

  Quickly I pushed Irina back, stepped outside, and shut the door.

  “Darling, are you spying on me? I hope not.”

  “‘Spying’—? No, I—I thought I’d heard . . .”

  “Let’s go upstairs, please. I was just leaving.”

  Trying to smile at my dear wife. Trying not to sound brusque, annoyed.

  She knows too much. Simply knowing there is a place in this house secret from her is knowing too much.

  It was annoying to me too, that Irina was wearing makeup—pale coral lipstick, a glaze of powder—and a silver necklace, and silver bracelet—signaling she’d been at the Friends School that day, among her colleagues. She was dressed nicely, and had done something to her hair. On her feet were striking shoes, open-backed sandals with a small heel, I was sure I’d never seen before. At home, with just husband Andrew, Irina rarely troubled with makeup, wore jeans and shapeless shirts and sweaters and an old pair of running shoes.

  It was late September. Several months since the day of the summons.

  Since the enemy had intruded in my life.

  “Andrew, why do you seem so—angry? I’m sorry if I disturbed you—I wasn’t ‘spying’ on you—truly . . . I’d just come home and thought I’d say hello—you weren’t in your study—I thought I heard voices in the basement . . .”

  “‘Voices’? Don’t be absurd.”

  “Well, I—I guess I was mistaken. I’m sorry.”

  “How could there have been voices? There is no one here except me.”