New Jersey Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She was pretty as a girl with a good figure, and attractive as a young woman, but never before have people accosted her thus in the street or come up to her when she goes swimming. Her husband is not the sort to pay much attention to her looks or give compliments. He loves her blindly, whether she looks old or young. Besides, he is still a busy man, refusing to retire, leaving early in the morning and coming back late at night, caring for the sick and the suffering. He is concerned with the state of the world, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the erosion of the earth. He refused to turn on the air-conditioning in their sunny house during the sultry fall weather. Now, in winter, he opens the curtains to take advantage of the greenhouse effect and consume less heating oil. He turns off lights, avoids the dishwasher.

  At first, she supposes it is because she is old that people feel free to say these things to her with impunity. Then she forgets to look into the mirror at the wrinkles, the brown spots, the blue veins in her legs, and the sag of her skin.

  She spends much of her day keeping fit. She jogs regularly and takes up yoga. She practices all the difficult poses: the wheel, the splits, the bind, the headstand. She stands on one leg, like a tree, head held high, arms raised to the sky. She looks around with secret satisfaction at the younger, heavier participants who strain, sweat, and topple. She consumes only fruit, vegetables, and nuts, and so loses weight. Sometimes a voice records her actions as though she were writing the story of her life in her head.

  It takes her awhile to realize that Gabriel is not charging her for the hour-long massages since she seldom checks her bills. She orders other services as well: manicures for her long nails which she now paints a blood-red. She thinks the receptionist has made a mistake but fears getting Gabriel into trouble. It even occurs to her that he has fallen in love with her, and that this is his way of letting her know.

  Finally, she asks him. He confesses shyly, not looking her in the eye, that he is writing something about her and does not like to charge his “characters.” “You can hardly be both a client and a character,” he says with a little grin. “Don’t mention the massage at the desk, please.”

  “Goodness! Everyone in this town seems to write! You have put me into a book?” she asks, amused and flattered, wondering what he could have written about her. She lies facedown, staring into nothingness, while he massages her neck. Her own memoir has sold quite well. People were fascinated by the changes in her life. Then he lifts the sheet, and she turns over. He is wiping his long tapering fingers on a towel, as she lies flat on her back before him in the darkened room, arms at her sides.

  “Well, actually, it’s only a story so far,” he says and smiles, with a flash of even white teeth. She peers at him more closely and realizes his blue eyes are slightly slanting in his flat face, giving him an Asian look. His arched nostrils quiver.

  “And what happens in the story?” she asks, curious now.

  “I’m not quite sure yet,” he says, looking at her with a glint of mischief in his eyes. “I’m relying on you to find me the middle and the end. We already have a fine beginning.”

  She catches a glimpse of something almost devilish in his expression and decides she will not come back again, even if the massages are therapeutic and free. She will go elsewhere or ask for a woman. She does not like the idea of being spied on, of being used for someone else’s purposes. What is he writing about her? What will he expect her to do to complete his story: fall in love with him because of his soft flattery, his caressing hands, his piercing blue eyes? Throw herself at his feet with desire, or even pay him to make love to her? He is quite mistaken, quite mistaken, she thinks, annoyed.

  Another strange thing has happened. After all these years, she is more in love with her husband than ever. She has always loved his thick hair, his luminous, dark eyes, his sweet voice, above all his intelligence and learning which have taught her so much. She has appreciated the way he takes care of her, carrying her suitcase to the train, dusting off her sandy feet at the beach, washing their dishes. She thinks of him as a character out of Chekhov, with little ambition but much energy and intelligence.

  Now, sometimes, when she sees her husband coming in the blue door late, looking gray and drawn, or rising in the morning, forced by faintness to put his head down between his knees, she feels almost breathless herself. She knows that, at seventy, they must soon leave one another. How could she go on without him? He is not a strong man, slim, with the heart of a thoroughbred, and a delicate, appealing beauty that is almost feminine. She makes passionate love to him in their big blue bedroom, as though each time were the last.

  Still, she misses the healing quality of the masseur’s hands, and the mysterious odor of the oil he rubbed on her body. People don’t seem to notice her as often. She has again become invisible. The pain has come back too. She tries other spas and masseuses, but they either hurt her or hardly touch her or talk too much. She decides to return to Gabriel. She will not ask him what he is writing.

  She comes and goes in silence, leaving the darkened, upstairs room with only a quiet “Thank you,” pressing a twenty- dollar tip into his hands with a stiff smile. She notices a gradual change in the pressure of his hands. They are increasingly forceful. Often, he presses down on the calf of her bad leg, as though deliberately to hurt her. She cries out, “That’s my bad leg! Be careful!” but he does not respond. He seems less and less polite. Occasionally, when she opens her eyes and looks up at him, she seems to see a hostile snarl.

  He now talks to her freely, disturbingly. “Do you want to know my surname?” he asks.

  “It is not necessary. I don’t really need to know,” she says.

  “It’s Wunderlich,” he says pausing for effect, lifting his hands from her leg.

  “That means wonderful in German, doesn’t it?”

  “You are thinking of wunderbar,” he retorts, laughing loudly at her mistake.

  She feels foolish and asks, “Well, what does it mean?”

  “Actually, it means strange, weird,” he says, snickering nastily.

  “You are German?” she asks, surprised, though she realizes she has always suspected he was a foreigner.

  “Volga German origin,” he replies.

  She doesn’t understand, thinks he has said, Vulgar German, which doesn’t make any sense. He explains that he comes from a group of persecuted people who lived along the Volga river during the time of Catherine the Great, who were invited into Russia from Germany. Later, they had their rights revoked and their land seized. His family had immigrated to America.

  She keeps her eyes shut, does not respond, and the silence resumes. But one afternoon, he comes back to the subject of his writing. He tells her he has been writing since he was very young.

  Lying faceup but not looking at him as he stands at the foot of the bed, massaging her feet, she asks, “Why do you write?” She has written her one book and, despite its success, has had no desire to write another. Recently, when she has done readings from the memoir someone in the audience inevitably comes up to have a copy signed but instead of complimenting her on her pages, the reader leans forward to whisper in her ear that she is beautiful or comments on her wonderful white hair.

  He has his hands on her sore leg now. “I suppose it makes me feel in control. I can do what I want on the page, make my characters come and go, live and love, or die,” he says, making her flex her leg, turning it out from the hip, so that her knee brushes his thigh.

  “I thought you said your story depended on what your characters decided to do? I thought the middle and the end were up to me,” she finds herself saying in an almost pleading tone, feeling him reach up her thigh, with pressure.

  He laughs loudly, and when she opens her eyes, she notices his teeth in the muffled light look long and not as white as she thought. “Well, I lied. The truth is, in the end, I am the one who decides. I allow my characters some freedom on the page, it is true. For a while they must feel free to find their own way, and sometimes they surp
rise me, which is amusing and makes for a good story. They provide me with the real details that make my stories believable.”

  “What details did I provide?” she asks suspiciously. What does he know about her? She has never told him anything, has she? What has he written about her?

  He has her left hand now, the one with the wedding ring, and he snaps the fingers back, one by one. “I have described you as you are: with your thick white hair, your sciatica, your skiing accident, your dear, distant husband.” He rolls the stool with an ominous rumble of wheels, to the head of the bed, sits down, and puts his hands on her shoulders. “I have read your memoir. You left home when you were fourteen, went to stay with a friend from school. Your mother was of Italian origin, an addict, the kind that uses needles—not very clean ones, in her case. She became ill and abandoned you. You became a waif. A teacher helped you for a while, for favors, it seems, if I read between the lines correctly?”

  She wants to get up and leave, but he has his hands around her neck, pressing down so hard that she has difficulty breathing.

  “Your husband saw you on the street and found you a bed in a hostel. He helped you get student loans, encouraged your literature studies, rewrote your papers. You found a teaching position at the state college. All these interesting facts are there, but in the end I am the one who must find a conclusion. There are certain universal requirements to stories, I’m afraid. You can’t just do what you like: they require a twist at the end.”

  She feels a little tremor go all through her naked body as he takes her head and lifts it slightly and turns it sharply to one side. Who is this man and why does he talk so strangely? Did she put all of this in her book, and why does he want to use her story for his own ends? She must get up and leave, but instead she finds herself asking him, “What about you? Have you always been a masseur?” only to regret it immediately.

  He tells her, his hands lingering painfully on her shoulders, digging into the nerves around her neck, “I have done many things to support myself. I even worked as a go-go dancer in my youth. They threw so much money at me!” He laughs in a loud vulgar way she finds distasteful.

  “You danced naked?” she says, shocked at this revelation.

  “Just a G-string and socks by the end, and sometimes not even that.”

  “Wasn’t that humiliating?”

  “Not at all. It made me feel powerful: money raining down on me, pushed into my socks, my G-string, by eager hands. You can’t imagine how much money they gave me just to see my nakedness,” he says triumphantly.

  She remembers something with shame, something she has not put in her book: the teacher who helped her, took pity on her, a middle-aged married man she had seduced. He was completely bald and rather fat. She made him spend money he could ill afford on her. She remembers the feeling of power, standing in an expensive shop looking around at the elegant clothes she wanted so badly. She remembers a soft beige cashmere coat that tied around the waist, pink silk underwear with lace, even a rhinestone necklace that glittered gaudily around her smooth young neck.

  She looks down at Gabriel’s hands on her collarbones and notices a dark spot on the back of his left hand. She wonders if he has some sort of terminal disease.

  “They wanted to see the size of my cock, you see,” he chuckles, standing up at her head and reaching all the way across her body to the tops of her thighs, so that she feels his sex pressed against her shoulder. She is disgusted, aroused, and terrified. He adds, “An unusually large one, if I say so myself. A Master Cock. I can balance a beer bottle on it when it’s erect. Would you like to see it?”

  The strange music plays on, the monotonous melody going back and forth from the harp to the violin. The odor of the pungent oil fills the room. She hears the squelch of his crepe-soled shoes as he turns around the bed. She decides the man is quite mad, quite mad, and probably dangerous. Still, she cannot move.

  He goes on, “Or perhaps you’d like a sip from such a source of life and love?”

  She sweeps the sheet around her, finally has the courage to rise up from the bed, to turn her back on him, and fumble for her robe, the slippers, her handbag. She says, “I will let the authorities know about this.”

  He laughs. “You are making a great mistake, you know. A Great Mistake. This is your last chance. After this, I’m moving on. You won’t find me again and that would be unfortunate for you.”

  When she rushes up to the man at the reception to report the incident, he looks at her strangely.

  “Not possible,” he says in a low voice, shaking his bald head at her. “None of our certified masseurs would act in this way, my dear. They have been trained. What did you say was the name?”

  “I assure you he did!” she snaps, incensed. “Gabriel, his name is Gabriel Wunderlich. I want to report him to the police!”

  “Wunderlich? Mr. Wonderful?” the man says with a half-grin, shaking his head slowly. Why is he calling her my dear in such a condescending way and looking around the crowded room with an apologetic smile as though embarrassed by her?

  “No! No! That’s not what it means!” she says, as though the meaning of the name were important.

  “I’m afraid you must be mistaken, my dear,” he responds slowly, enunciating, as though she is mentally deficient, or a foreigner.

  “Yes! Yes! That’s his name. He’s a Volga German. Someone who came from Russia to Germany, or was it Germany to Russia?” In her distress she is confused, cannot remember.

  He raises his eyebrows at her, purses his lips. “In any case, my dear, I assure you we have no one of that name here. We had a Gabriel at one point, but he left some time ago, and he was a Gabriel Hart, an Englishman, I believe. Perhaps you’d like a nice cup of soothing chamomile tea?” Clearly, he thinks she is mad.

  She rushes home, shuts the curtains, takes off her clothes, and climbs into the double bed in the big blue bedroom, though it is only five in the afternoon. She lies with her face to the wall, shivering. When her husband arrives home he comes to her bedside and asks what is wrong, but she cannot speak. “Go away,” she says.

  She goes on lying there all the next day, refusing to eat, until her husband comes home again and finds her still in bed. He says severely, “You must get up! This is ridiculous! There is nothing wrong with you.” He tells her, “Perhaps, after all, you need to go back to work. Why don’t you write something?”

  She is walking through the hot streets one fall evening, alone, a year since she first met Gabriel. The light is dim, the shops shut up, and the side street, where she thinks she parked her car, deserted. The solitude of the tree-lined suburban street seems worse than any forest. The echoes of her childhood loneliness chime unbearably in her head.

  She is not thinking about her massages, the strange words Gabriel Wunderlich or whatever his real name was said to her in the dark room. She has tried to write about him, following her husband’s suggestion, but she cannot find the end to the story.

  It has been a long, tiring day. Increasingly, she finds all the sport she does tiring. After her swim, she ate a whole bar of chocolate gluttonously in the ladies’ room. Then she gathered her hot white hair up into a tight bun on the top of her head. She noticed the brown spots on her cheek, the two broken nails and that none of them looked very clean. Staring at herself in the mirror, she drew back her lips and saw her long teeth, the pale gums receded. For the first time she understood the old expression, Long in the tooth.

  Now she turns her head, aware that someone is following her in the deserted street. She hears the familiar squelch of the crepesoled shoes and smells the secret odor of the oil in the evening air. She says the name aloud: “Wunderlich.” She wants to run, but in her high-heeled shoes and tight skirt, her heart beating hard, as in a dream, she cannot advance. She glances nervously over her shoulder into the shadows of the solitary street. She must get to her car.

  But when she looks back, she sees no one. All she can hear is the sound of her own words, recording her life,
the end of her story, and the crepe-soled shoes, echoing in her mind.

  ATLANTIS

  BY RICHARD BURGIN

  Atlantic City

  She sat up in bed, rigid but strangely alert, as if trying to identify the sound of something underwater. When he touched her shoulder to try to make her lie down again, she turned toward the wall.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  She shook her head back and forth.

  “Rina, come on, what is it? You’re scaring me.”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “Take a hit of that joint I made for you on the bureau. It’ll help.”

  “How long we gonna go on like this, huh? What’s your plan, Stacy? Is there one?”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

  “Course you don’t understand,” she said, finally facing him. “Things going along pretty much the way you want? Just stay high every minute with me in this tomb under the ground, that’s below sea level, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I’m not high every minute.” He wanted to add that his place wasn’t below sea level either but he wasn’t 100 percent sure if it was or not.

  “C’mon, can you face reality just a little? You wake up and have a Quaalude so you can take a shower. To counteract that you smoke a joint so you can have sex with me in the morning. Then to get through the day you take more Quaalude or sometimes E. Then it’s back to pot so we can watch TV and go to sleep. What do you think, you’re gonna die if you aren’t high for a minute?”

  “Okay. We’ll cut back a little. I’ll cut back.”

  “It’s not just the drugs.”

  “What?”

  “We never go anywhere. We never do anything.”