Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Inside, most of the downstairs rooms were dark. Now it was late October night came quickly. Pleasantly excited, a little nervous, Hadley went about switching on lights. There was a curious intimacy between her and Anton Kruppe, in this matter of switching on lights. Hadley heard her voice warmly uplifted—no idea what she was saying—as her tall lanky guest in his stocking feet—soiled-looking gray wool socks—came to stand at the threshold of the living room—stared into the interior of the long beautifully furnished living room with a shoulder-high stone fireplace at its farther end, book-filled shelves, Chinese carpets on a gleaming hardwood floor. Above the fireplace was a six-by-eight impressionist New England landscape of gorgeous pastel colors that drew the eye to it, as in a vortex.

  Excitedly Anton Kruppe asked—was the painting by Cezanne?

  “‘Cezanne’! Hardly.”

  Hadley laughed, the question was so naïve. Except for surreal pastel colors and a high degree of abstraction in the rendering of massed tree trunks and foliage, there was little in the Wolf Kahn canvas to suggest the earlier, great artist.

  Outside, while Anton changed the floodlight, Hadley had been thinking I will offer him coffee. That’s enough for tonight. But now that they were out of the October chill and inside the warm house it was a drink—wine—she offered him: a glass of dark red Catena wine, from a bottle originally purchased by her husband. Anton thanked her profusely calling her “Hedley”—a flush of pleasure rose into his odd, angular face. In his wiry hair that was the color of ditch water a small pumpkin seed shone.

  Hadley poured herself a half-glass of wine. Her hand shook just slightly. She thought If I don’t offer him a second glass. If I don’t ask him to stay.

  Since there was an opened jar of Brazilian nuts on the sideboard, Hadley offered these to Anton, too. A cascade of nuts into a blue-ceramic bowl.

  Gratefully Anton drank, and Anton ate. Thirstily, hungrily. Drifting about Hadley’s living room peering at her bookshelves, in his gray wool socks. Excitedly he talked—he had so much to say!—reminding Hadley of a chattering bird—a large endearingly gawky bird like an ostrich—long-legged, long-necked, with a beaky face, quick-darting inquisitive eyes. So sharply his hair receded from his forehead, it resembled some sort of garden implement—a hand trowel?—and his upper body, now he’d removed his nylon parka, was bony, concave. Hadley thought He would be waxy-pale, beneath. A hairless chest. A little potbelly, and spindly legs.

  Hadley laughed. Already she’d drunk half her glass of wine. A warm sensation suffused her throat and in the region of her heart.

  Politely Hadley tried to listen—to concentrate—as her eccentric guest chattered rapidly and nervously and with an air of schoolboy enthusiasm. How annoying Anton was! Like many shy people once he began talking he seemed not to know how to stop; he lacked the social sleight of hand of changing the subject; he had no idea how to engage another in conversation. Like a runaway vehicle down a hill he plunged on, head-on, heedless. And yet, there was undeniably something attractive about him.

  More incensed now, impassioned—though he seemed to be joking, too—speaking of American politics, American pop culture, “American fundamentist ignorance” about stem-cell research. And how ignorant, more than ninety percent of Americans believed in God—and in the devil.

  Hadley frowned at this. Ninety percent? Was this so? It didn’t seem plausible that as many people would believe in the devil, as believed in God.

  “Yes, yes! To believe in the Christian God is to believe in His enemy—the devil. That is known.”

  With his newfound vehemence Anton drained his glass of the dark red Catena wine and bluntly asked of his hostess if he might have more?—helping himself at the sideboard to a second, full glass and scooping up another handful of the Brazilian nuts. Hadley wondered if he meant to be rude—or simply didn’t know better. “I can’t really think,” she persisted, “that as many Americans believe in the devil, as believe in God. I’m sure that isn’t so. Americans are—we are—a tolerant nation…”

  How smug this sounded. Hadley paused not knowing what she meant to say. The feral-dark wine had gone quickly to her head.

  With a snort of derision Anton said, “‘A tolerant nation’—is it? Such ‘tolerance’ as swallows up and what it cannot, it makes of an enemy.”

  “‘Enemy’? What do you mean?”

  “It makes of war. First is declared the enemy, then the war.”

  Anton laughed harshly, baring his teeth. Chunky yellow teeth they were, and the gums pale-pink. Seeing how Hadley stared at him he said, in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “First there is the ‘tolerance’—then, the ‘pre-empt strike.’”

  Hadley’s face flushed with the heat of indignation. This was insulting—it had to be deliberate—Anton Kruppe who’d lived in the United States for much of his life knew very well the history of the Iraq War, how Americans were misled, deceived by the Republican leadership. Of course he knew. She opened her mouth to protest bitterly then thought better of it.

  Surreptitiously she glanced at her wristwatch. Only 6:48 P.M.! Her guest had been inside the house less than a half hour but the strain of his visit was such, it seemed much longer.

  Still Anton was prowling about, staring. Artifacts from trips Hadley and her husband had taken, over the years—Indonesian pottery, African masks, urns, wall hangings, Chinese wall scrolls and watercolors, beautifully carved wooden figures from Bali. A wall of brightly colored “primitive” paintings from Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala. Yet more, the books on Hadley’s shelves seemed to intrigue Anton, as if these hundreds of titles acquired years ago, if not decades ago, mostly by Hadley’s husband who’d earned both a Ph.D. in European history and a law degree from Columbia University, possessed an immediate, singular significance and were not rather relics of a lost and irretrievable private past.

  “You have read all these, Hedley—yes?”

  Hadley laughed, embarrassed. No, she had not.

  “Then—someone else? All these?”

  Hadley laughed again, uncertain. Was Anton Kruppe mocking her? She felt a slight repugnance for the man, who peered at her, as at her art-objects and bookshelves, with an almost hostile intensity; yet she could not help it, so American was her nature, so female, she was anxious that he should like her, and admire her—if that could be settled, she would send him away, in triumph.

  Remembering the foreign-born children at her schools. In middle school they had seemed pitiful, objects of sympathy, charity, and condescension, if not derision; in high school, overnight it seemed they’d become A-students, star athletes. A drivenness to them, the complacent Americans had mistaken initially as weakness.

  In soiled wool socks Anton continued to prowl about. Hadley had not invited him to explore her house—had she? His manner was more childlike than aggressive. Hadley supposed that Anton’s own living quarters in university-owned housing were minimal, cramped. A row of subsidized faculty housing along the river…“Ah! This is—‘solar-room’?” They were in a glass-walled room at the rear of the stone house, that had been added to the house by Hadley and her husband; the “solarium,” intended to be sun-warmed, was furnished with white wicker furniture, chintz pillows and a white wrought-iron table and chairs as in an outdoor setting. But now the room was darkened and shadowed and the bright festive chintz colors were undistinguishable. Only through the vertical glass panels shone a faint crescent moon, entangled in the tops of tall pines. Anton was admiring yet faintly sneering, taunting:

  “Such a beautiful house—it is old, is it?—so big, for one person. You are so very lucky, Hedley. You know this, yes?”

  Lucky! Hadley smiled, confused. She tried to see this.

  “Yes, I think so. I mean—yes.”

  “So many houses in this ‘village’ as it is called—they are so big. For so few people. On each acre of land, it may be one person—the demographics would show. Yes?”

  Hadley wasn’t sure what Anton Kruppe was saying. A brash sort of merriment
shone in his eyes, widened behind the smudged lenses of his wire-rimmed schoolboy glasses.

  He asked Hadley how long she’d lived in the house and when she told him since 1988, when she and her husband had moved here, he’d continued smiling, a pained fixed smile, but did not ask about her husband. He must know, then. Someone at the co-op has told him.

  Bluntly Anton said, “Yes, it is ‘luck’—America is the land of ‘opportunity’—all that is deserved, is not always granted.”

  “But it wasn’t ‘luck’—my husband worked. What we have, he’d earned.”

  “And you, Hedley? You have ‘earned’—also?”

  “I—I—I don’t take anything for granted. Not any longer.”

  What sort of reply this was, a stammered resentful rush of words, Hadley had no clear idea. She was uneasy, Anton peered at her closely. It was as if the molecular biologist was trying to determine the meaning of her words by staring at her. A kind of perverse echolocation—was that the word?—the radar-way of bats tossing high-pitched beeps of sound at one another. Except Anton was staring, his desire for the rich American woman came to him through the eyes…Hadley saw that the pumpkin seed—unless it was a second seed, or a bit of pumpkin-gristle—glistened in his wiry hair, that looked as if it needed shampooing and would be coarse to the touch. Except she could not risk the intimacy, she felt a reckless impulse to pluck it out.

  He would misunderstand. He is such a fool, he would misinterpret.

  But if I wanted a lover. A lover for whom I felt no love.

  As if Anton had heard these words, his mood changed suddenly. His smile became startled, pained—he was a man for whom pained smiles would have to do. Asking Hadley if there were more repairs for “Mister Fix-It” in her house and Hadley said quickly, “No. No more.”

  “Your basement—furnace—that, I could check. I am trained—you smile, Hedley, but it is so. To support myself in school—”

  Hadley was sure she wasn’t smiling. More firmly she thanked Anton and told him she had to leave soon—“I’m meeting friends for dinner in town.”

  Clearly this was a lie. Hadley could lie only flatly, brazenly. Her voice quavered, she felt his eyes fixed upon her.

  Anton took a step closer. “I would come back another day, if needed. I would be happy to do this, Hedley. You know this—I am your friend Anton—yes?”

  “No. I mean—yes. Some other time, maybe.”

  Hadley meant to lead her awkward guest back out into the living room, into the lighted gallery and foyer near the front door. He followed in her wake muttering to himself—unless he was talking to Hadley, and meant her to hear—to laugh—for it seemed that Anton was laughing, under his breath. His mood was mercurial—as if he’d been hurt, in the midst of having been roused to indignation. He’d drained his second glass of wine and his movements had become jerky, uncoordinated like those of a partially come-to-life scarecrow.

  It was then that Anton began to confide in Hadley, in a lowered and agitated voice: the head of his laboratory at the Institute had cheated him—he’d taken discoveries of Anton Kruppe to claim for his own—he’d published a paper in which Anton was cited merely in a list of graduate assistants—and now, when Anton protested, he was exiling Anton from the lab—he refused to speak to Anton at the Institute and had banished him and so Anton had gone to the university president—demanding to be allowed to speak to the president but of course he’d been turned away—came back next morning hoping to speak with the president and when he was told no, demanding then to speak with the provost—and the university attorney—their offices were near-together in the administration building—all of them were in conspiracy together, with the head of the Institute and the head of Anton’s laboratory—he knew this!—of course, he was not such a fool, to not know this—he’d become excited and someone called security—campus police arrived and led Anton away protesting—they had threatened to turn him over to township police—to be arrested for “trespassing”—“threatening bodily harm”—Anton had been terrified he’d be deported by Homeland Security—he had not yet an American citizenship—

  “You are smiling, Hedley? What is the joke?”

  Smiling? During this long breathless disjointed speech Hadley had been staring at Anton Kruppe in astonishment.

  “It is amusing to you—yes? That all my work, my effort—I am most hardworking in the lab, our supervisor exploits my good nature—he was always saying ‘Anton is the stoic among us’—what this means, this flattery of Americans, is how you can be used. To be used—that is our purpose, to the Institute. But you must not indicate, that you are in the know.” Anton spoke like one whose grievances are so much in excess of his ability to express them, he might have been the bearer of an ancient, racial burden. “And now—after three years—when my findings are cheated from me and I am of no more use—it is time to toss away into the ‘Dumpster’—that is good word, good joke, eh?—‘Dumpster’—very good American joke—the Institute is saying my contract will not be renewed, for the federal grant is ended. And my supervisor had not ever gotten around to aiding me with my citizenship application, years it has been, of course I have been dialtory myself—I have been working so hard in the lab—yesterday morning it was, the decision came to me by e-mail…You—you must not smile, Hedley! That is very—selfish. That is very selfish and very cruel.”

  The indignant man loomed over Hadley. His angular face wasn’t so soft now but hardened with strain. His jaws were clenched like muscles. The trowel-shaped triangle of hair at his hairline was more pronounced and a sweaty-garbagey smell wafted from his heated body. Behind the smudged schoolboy lenses his eyes were deep-socketed, wary. Hadley said nervously, “Maybe you should leave, Anton. I’m expecting friends. I mean…they’re stopping by, to take me with them. To dinner in town…”

  Hadley didn’t want her agitated visitor to sense how frightened she was of him. Her mistake was in turning away to lead him to the door. Insulting him. His arm looped around her neck, in an instant they were struggling off balance, he caught at her, and kissed her—kissed and bit at her lips, like a suddenly ravenous rodent—both their wineglasses went flying, clattering to the floor—“You like this, Hedley! This, you want. For this, you asked me.”

  He overcame her. She was fighting him, whimpering and trying to scream, trying to draw breath to scream but he’d pushed her down, horribly she was on the floor, pushed down helpless and panicked on the floor of her own house, in terror thinking that Anton was trying to strangle her, then it seemed that he was kissing her, or trying to—in panic she jammed her elbows into his chest, his ribs—his mouth came over hers again—his mouth was wet and ravenous and his teeth closed over her lip, in terror she thought that he would bite off her lip, in a kind of manic elation he was murmuring what sounded like You like me! You want this! Grunting with effort he straddled her, his face was flushed with emotion, fury; he brought his knee up between her legs, roughly; their struggle had become purely physical, and desperate, enacted now in near-silence except for their panting breaths. Hadley had no idea what she was doing moving her head from side to side trying to avoid the man’s mouth, his sharp yellow teeth, the smell of his agitated breath, the mouth was like that of a great sea leech sucking at her, sucking at her tongue, the back of her head was being struck against the hardwood floor Oh!—oh—oh as if he wanted to crack her skull, his fingers were poking and jabbing at her between her legs, in a paroxysm of desperation Hadley managed to squirm out from beneath him, like a panicked animal crawling on hands and knees and almost in that instant she believed that she might escape Anton Kruppe except he had only to lunge after her, seize her ankle in his strong fingers, laughing and climbing over her straddling her again more forcibly this time closing his fingers around her neck so now she knew she could not escape, she knew it was certain, she would die. In a choked voice Anton was saying, “You—want me here! You asked for this. You have no right to laugh at me. You and your ‘trustee’ husband…” In the confusion of
the moment Hadley had no idea what Anton was saying. Trustee? Her husband had served on an advisory board for the history department at the university, he’d had no association with the molecular biology institute. She could not have explained this, she had not the strength, or the breath; she felt her assailant’s fingers now poking inside her, she cried out in pain and kicked at him squirming beneath him like a creature desperate to escape a predator yet she had time to think almost calmly This can’t be happening. This is wrong. She seemed to see herself in that instant with a strange stillness and detachment as frequently through her marriage when she’d lain with her husband and made love with her husband and her mind had slipped free and all that was physical, visceral, immediate and not-to-be-halted happening to her was at a little distance, though now tasting the wine on Anton’s tongue, the dark-sour-feral wine taste of a man’s mouth like her own, he’d lost patience now and was jamming at her with two fingers, three fingers forced up inside the soft flesh between her legs which Hadley knew was loathed by the man, he was furious with her there, disgusted with her there, his hatred was pure and fiery for her there as she begged him Please don’t hurt me Anton, I want to be your friend Anton I will help you. It wasn’t wine she was tasting but blood—he’d bitten her upper lip—on his feet now looming over her—his work-trousers unzipped, disheveled—his shirt loose, blood-splattered—he’d managed to get to his feet disengaging himself from her—their tangle of limbs, torn clothing, tears, saliva—he staggered away to the front door—stiff-legged as a scarecrow come partway to life—and was gone.

  She lay very still. Where he’d left her, she lay with a pounding heart, bathed in sweat and the smell of him, her brain stuck blank, oblivious of her surroundings until after several minutes—it may have been as many as ten or fifteen minutes—she realized that she was alone. It had not quite happened to her as she’d believed it would happen, the crossing-over.

  She managed to get to her feet. She was dazed, sobbing. Some time was required, that she could stand without swaying. Leaning against a chair in the hall, touching the walls. In the opened doorway she stood, staring outside. The front walk was dimly illuminated by a crescent moon overhead. Here was a meager light, a near-to-fading light. She saw that the pumpkin-head had fallen from the step, or had been kicked. On its side it was revealed to be part-shattered, you could see that the back of the cranium was missing. Brains had been scooped out but negligently so that seeds remained, bits of pumpkin-gristle. She stepped outside. Her clothing was torn. Her clothing that was both expensive and tasteful had been torn and was splattered with blood. She wiped at her mouth, that was bleeding. She would run back into the house, she would dial 911. She would report an assault. She would summon help. For badly she required help, she knew that Anton Kruppe would return. Certainly he would return. On the front walk she stood staring toward the road. What she could see of the road in the darkness. On the roadway there were headlights. An unmoving vehicle. It was very dark, a winter-dark had come upon them. She called out, “Hello? Hello? Who is it?” Headlights on the roadway, where his vehicle was parked.