American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  BY THE TIME the taxi comes for Marvis it is 1:20 A.M. Glynnis, switching off the lights in the kitchen, dining room, living room, sips a glass of leftover Bernkasteler Doktor Auslese 1982, swaying, in her stockinged feet, with exhaustion and exhilaration: for Ian McCullough’s fiftieth birthday has been a great success . . . a memorable evening, as everyone said . . . the food superb . . . no one quite like Glynnis. Ian, helping clear the dining room table, swaying too on his feet, was apologetic, contrite, speaking slowly, enunciating each syllable, his way when he has had too much to drink and doesn’t know it. Saying for the third or fourth time, “I am sorry, I hadn’t realized, I didn’t mean to be rude, I seem to have lost track of. . . .”

  And then Bianca comes home; and Glynnis feels compelled to speak with her, if only to show her, the hurtful little bitch, how little her absence meant: how little, in truth, her mother had been hurt by her selfish behavior. “And did you enjoy yourself, with—who was it, Kim?” Glynnis begins.

  And Bianca says quickly, “Yes. Kim. And, yes, I did”—peeling off her sweater—“and how was Daddy’s party here?”

  “Daddy’s party was fine,” Glynnis says, betraying no irony, no anger, not even reproach, as, all but ignoring her, Bianca stretches, and yawns, and shakes her head as a dog shakes its head, a handsome young woman whose vision of herself, so far as Glynnis can determine, is deliberately crude, flat-footed, clumsy, the obverse of her mother’s style, it might be said, and in defiance of it. “Where did you eat finally?” Glynnis asks.

  And Bianca says, shrugging, “Nowhere special.”

  Glynnis says, “Yes, but where?”

  And Bianca turns away, bored, sullen, belching beer. “One of the usual places.”

  Why do you hate me? Glynnis thinks. Why, when I love you, when I would love you, except for your opposition?

  Mother and daughter are standing just outside the door to Bianca’s room. It is twenty to two; Ian has gone to bed; beyond them, the house, emptied of its guests, seems deafeningly silent, a mysterious becalmed ship at dock in a nighttime sea. Glynnis stares at Bianca, who will not look at her, wanting to take the girl’s face in her hands, to squeeze, to frame, to define; thinking, And shall we quarrel, or shall we kiss each other good night? Or shall we, accustomed as we are of giving and taking hurt, simply say good night, and turn away, and let things as they are.

  Bianca says, “Well—”

  Glynnis says, “Well.” And then, turning away, softly, “Good night.”

  IAN, ON HIS back, lies with a forearm slung over his eyes, to shield them from the bedside lamp. His breath is audible, rasping; he appears to be asleep, unmoving, his long legs outstretched, perfectly still, like a stone figure atop a sarcophagus.

  Glynnis slips on a nightgown; out of old habit draws her hands up, and over, her breasts, cupping them for an instant, feeling an instant’s perplexity and regret. They say of course that it is the body that betrays; the self, the soul, remains inviolate; thus you are twenty years old so abruptly, so rudely, in a fifty-year-old body. And your journey has only now begun.

  I cannot bear it, Glynnis thinks.

  Something will happen and it will happen soon and it will happen without my volition or responsibility: but what?

  She thinks of Ian, surprised in his study in the dark, having made, or having attempted to make, or having contemplated making, a telephone call. A professional call, and why not believe it, why not? For after all (Glynnis begins to think, heartened) it is not the first time Ian, or one or another of his colleagues, like Vincent, like Denis, above all Amos, has acted similarly. . . . Social life does not mean to men what it means to women, Elizabeth Kuhn once remarked. That is a fact we must always remember.

  But an old memory, an old perplexity, intrudes: in January, Ian went to a professional conference in Boston at which he, or the Journal, received an award; but when Glynnis telephoned, on Saturday afternoon, she was informed that Ian had already checked out of the hotel. The conference was scheduled to disband on Sunday afternoon; Ian had told her he would be home Sunday evening; where was he? She thought, I will resist the impulse to call one of his friends. I will resist the impulse to hunt him down.

  And when, Sunday evening, Ian returned home, tired, irritable, vague, telling Glynnis that the conference had not gone “perfectly”—there was a conservative faction gathering power among his colleagues, a sort of political-sociobiological element he found incipiently racist and in other ways distasteful—Glynnis said only, “What about your award; aren’t you pleased with that?” And Ian said, “Oh, yes, yes, of course,” as if he’d only then remembered it; and to placate her, as a child might placate his mother, he showed her the gilt-stamped document from the National Association of Political Scientists and the check for $1,500. Glynnis had determined she would not ask him about the hotel but heard herself nonetheless ask, casually, “When did you leave Boston?” Ian said, with no apparent hesitation, “Today. This afternoon. The conference lasted until this afternoon.” Still casually, Glynnis said, “But I telephoned you yesterday and they told me you’d checked out, a day ahead of time,” adding, lest it seem she was accusing him—for she was hardly, after all, accusing him—“There must have been a mistake at the desk.” By this time Ian had turned away, was walking away, said only, over his shoulder, “Yes, that’s right—I mean, that is probably right. A mistake at the desk.”

  And Glynnis wanted to scream after him, to rush at him, striking with her fists, hitting, hurting, demanding: Are you lying to me? Are you deceiving me? Don’t you know there will be consequences?

  NOW SHE SLIPS into bed, not wanting to disturb him, switches off the bedside lamp, turns to him, as, usually, reflexively, he turns to her; and she kisses him, sleepily; and he wakes, and kisses her, yet very sleepily; and they ease apart. Glynnis customarily sleeps facing the edge of the bed, on her right, partly hugging herself: a childhood habit never outgrown. Except for infrequent restless nights and more frequent bouts of nighttime sweating, she is a quiet, even inert sleeper: heavy-seeming, in sleep, as a dark quivering pool rises to meet her and enclose her, her breath oddly quickening as a cascade of images, primarily faces, rush at her . . . some of them recognizable, the faces of her friends (though distorted, distended, as in a fun-house mirror) but most of them the faces of strangers (yet so striking in their vivid, hallucinatory detail, she cannot believe they are but mere fictions of her unstoppered imagination): rush at her like a speeding landscape in which she is passive, frozen, an uncomprehending witness. Yet it is not nightmare, nor does it ever lead to nightmare; simply a sleep of exhaustion steeped in alcohol . . . through which she makes her way, drifting, dropping, sinking, an element dense and porous as water that yields, always abruptly, another place . . . ah, but she is barefoot, and the floorboards are cold, and an odor as of stale food permeates the air, and drink . . . someone has spilled wine on the tablecloth, Ian said, a pity, do you think it will come out, our beautiful tablecloth, Ian said, but the brass chandelier shines and the candelabra with their tall graceful candles, the afterimages of the flames reflected in the mirror above the sideboard and in the glass walls and sliding door, and in the kitchen the bottoms of the copper pans shine like miniature moons and the hanging plants in the window quiver spiderlike with their own secret life and why, Glynnis thinks, why is Marvis so barely civil to her the latter part of the evening, unsmiling and unresponsive and Glynnis has always been so nice to her, generous at Christmas, careful not to be, not even to seem, condescending, what do they want, these black women, the women as mysterious finally as the men, what do they want from us we seem incapable of giving? . . . but Glynnis and Ian are at the door saying good night to their friends, Glynnis’s warm cheek is being kissed, and she kisses in return, happily, greedily, Denis’s liquorish breath in her face, and she laughs, and winces, and pushes him away, or is it another man, a stranger, she pushes away, as a woman she does not recognize stands on her tiptoes and kisses Ian good night, no, it is Roberta, or is it
Meika, it is Roberta, but her hand is skeletal and cold so that in fright Glynnis drops it but shows no alarm, her facial skin tight as a mask showing no alarm, I love you both, I love love love you both, I drown in all of you.

  AND THE DOOR is closed, with care, in the glass wall.

  It’s an instinct now, with the McCulloughs.

  Living in a glass house, after all.

  On her bare drifting feet Glynnis traverses the many rooms of her house, these rooms that, though some of them appear unknown to her, are nonetheless hers, and her responsibility; in one of them, cavelike, cavernous, she discovers her daughter sleeping or the child they assured her was hers sleeping a baby’s intense trembling sleep so deep she cannot be wakened; and how am I responsible, Glynnis protests, what am I to do? And in another room, in which the walls come together at a peculiar slant and the ceiling presses low and the air is humid, as in a greenhouse, there are Ian and Glynnis, the McCulloughs, in bed, beneath familiar covers, turned from each other in the privacy and loneliness of sleep and their bodies curled inward, coiled, like the bodies of soft creatures whose shells have been prized off them; and each is the other’s twin, though turned resolutely away from the other, in the privacy and loneliness of sleep. And Glynnis is suddenly angry with them, and impatient, yawning a swift savage jaw-aching yawn like the one that overcame her in the kitchen, the bright lights on and Marvis at the sink noisily rinsing dishes, noisily setting them in the dishwasher except for those too delicate to entrust to the washer which will have to be done by hand: surely you know which ones, Marvis, after all our years together? At the far end of the beautifully set table sits a tall pale stranger eating her food drinking her wine baring his teeth in a wide white grin; but the candlelight is blinding, Glynnis cannot make out his face.

  But now the house is empty. And the silence is deafening. A becalmed ship, drifting out to sea. Her bare feet have brought her to that spot at which the dining room opens out onto the living room, perpendicularly, the farthest wall, which Glynnis, though her eyes are good, can barely see; dissolving into mere night, the plate-glass walls and windows and sliding doors dissolving to mere night, no words and no language, and Glynnis thinks in triumph, My house. My family. My life. Mine.

  GLASS

  1.

  The end came swiftly and irrevocably. And surely without premeditation.

  It was April 23, and unseasonably warm; and when Ian returned from the Institute, at dusk, it was, still, warm as an evening in summer; the air smelled both flowery and crystalline: an evening, Ian thought, to break one’s heart. The sensation of vertigo, of being rudderless, adrift, suspended, that had plagued him for so many weeks—or had it been, now, months?—seemed the more intensified tonight, as if the very air had altered. He would not be able to breathe, he thought; he would suffocate, entering his house.

  He parked the Honda in the graveled drive, in its usual position; noted that Glynnis’s station wagon was in the carport, in its usual position; had a vague recollection of having seen something out of place, or amiss, out front . . . though he would not realize what it was until the next day: an oblong package, by the size and shape of it a shipment from the Musical Heritage Society containing a record Glynnis had ordered, signaling the curious fact that the mail had not been brought in, as it always was, when Glynnis’s car was in the drive; when Glynnis was home. On days when Glynnis was out and returned after Ian did, he sometimes wandered about the house, looking vaguely for something he could not have named, feeling that it should be on the kitchen table, where Glynnis usually sorted the mail, though sensing too that, whatever it was, it might also be waiting for him on his desk; for Glynnis sometimes brought his mail there. If he made a particular effort to figure out what was missing, he would remember; often, of course, he simply pushed the vexing thought away, and forgot, and to Glynnis’s amusement, or annoyance, failed to bring it in at all. “You leave everything for me to do,” Glynnis would say, half seriously; and though the accusation was surely unjust, Ian could offer no refutation. He lived in a world of his own thoughts and had done so since boyhood. And, of late, it seemed to be getting worse.

  That morning, Ian had been at his desk, at the Institute, at seven-forty-five. There was a problem with one of the computer programs they were using for the Health Service project, and there was a problem, made the more nettlesome by distance, about the exact day when Ian was scheduled to give his paper at the Second Annual International Conference on “Hunger and the ‘First World’” in Frankfurt, West Germany, in late May. (The paper itself, for which Ian had high hopes, was not yet written: consisting, at this time, of mere scribbled notes and pages of computer printouts, which, when Ian stared at them, refused to crystallize into the formal, impeccable logic characteristic of Ian McCullough’s best efforts. I will sleep on it, Ian told himself. I will give myself a few more days before I begin to get desperate.) There was, at his office, the usual daunting wash of mail, including, these spring mornings, a number of those dispiriting, because so frequent, requests from former students, former colleagues, former friends, for letters of recommendation (for university positions, Guggenheim, Rockeller, National Endowment fellowships, and the rest). Sometimes I think I dare not die, Denis said, for fear my ducklings would expire. Through the day the telephone rang, and rang, and rang, and some of these calls Ian took in his capacity as editor of The Journal of International Politics, and some of these calls he took in his capacity as the head of the demographic research team; and some he took as, merely, Ian McCullough. When he was gone from his desk for any period of time—he played squash, late mornings, five days a week, then had lunch, most days, in the Institute dining room, with his friends—he would return to find a tidy little pile of pink slips awaiting him, with notations from Mrs. Fairchild, his secretary. A message from. Please call. Always, he looked through the pink slips quickly, with both anticipation and dread. Would she have called him? No? Yes? Today? But why not today? She called at unpredictable times.

  He did not like to telephone her; though, of course, he sometimes did, having long ago memorized the Poughkeepsie number, which he could punch out as rapidly as his forefinger moved; a sort of stylized tic it had become, requiring little conscious thought. At the other end in the paid-for but so rarely, these days, occupied apartment, Sigrid Hunt’s telephone rang and rang and rang; and Ian McCullough, gripping the receiver, would think, Yes, good, no one is home. Good.

  But most of the time he was working, of course. At his desk or in the computer room or in the Institute library, a handsome vaulted plushly carpeted space in which the individual was dwarfed, not in size (for the highly specialized library was not large as libraries go) but in significance: amid the neatly arranged stacks of books, books to the floor and books to the ceiling; amid the hieratic portraits of great men, Hobbes, Comte, Bentham, Mill, Marx, Engels, Spencer, Durkheim, William James, John Dewey; amid glass-encased exhibits of such items as newly acquired antique or rare or simply very expensive books like the leatherbound gilt-embroidered Iliad opened to the early speech of Achilles when the hero tells the doomed Lyacon, who has begged him for mercy, Now there is not one who can escape death, if the gods send / him against my hands in front of Ilion, not one / of all the Trojans, and beyond others the children of Priam. / So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamor about it? / Patroklos also is dead, who was better by far than you are. / Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid / and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal? / Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny, and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime / when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also . . . words which, beyond the curving glare of the glass case, stirred in Ian so profound yet so inexplicable a sense of his own extinction that he had to leave the library at once and return to his office, to the little lavatory adjoining his office, that no one might be a witness to his agitation.

  But most of the time he was at his desk: quite visibly and, it seemed
, happily working. His young assistants joked behind his back of being terrorized by Ian McCullough: not by the man himself—“he’s really wonderful, so easy to talk to, actually sweet, and unpretentious”—but by the professional standards of integrity, industry, singlemindedness of which he was a model.

  Ian would not have wanted them, or anyone, to know how he plunged into his work these mornings as a swimmer plunges into the wave that sweeps toward him and will engulf him. There is no way but forward, after all.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE, it had happened again; or, rather, had not happened again; and Glynnis with her instinct for self-hurt murmured, You don’t love me, you are indifferent to me, is that it, isn’t that it, do you love another woman, is that it?—and Ian could do nothing but protest, for he too was hurt, and perplexed, and anxious, and resentful, yes, and angry as well, saying of course he loved her of course of course he loved her, why didn’t they let the matter rest?

  It was not precisely a new issue in their marriage, in any case. Over the trajectory of twenty-six years and even, as Ian vaguely recalled, intermittently at the very start, he had sometimes been impotent in their lovemaking—if “impotent” was the right, the not too cruelly clinical term—not, as Glynnis believed, out of indifference to her, and certainly not, as she was beginning to believe, out of rejection of her, but simply because it happened that way. And did not happen the other way.