American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And there were, too, surely, the merely curious, the morbid minded: those who had an instinct, however infrequently gratified in Hazelton, for local scandal.

  Reverend Ebenbach began the service by calling upon them to pray. Ian meant to concentrate on all that took place, to memorize, if possible, the man’s elegiac words; but within minutes his thoughts drifted compulsively, his gaze, like Bianca’s, drawn to the casket only a few yards away—that fiercely polished object, a work of art, a work of mystification, appearing, in the narrow space at the front of the church, so much larger and heavier than it needed to be. It was for all its beauty somehow rude and barbaric: the very cynosure of interest, beside which Ebenbach’s earnest words quickly faded. To think that Glynnis was inside it—contained inside it! Dear sweet Jesus, Ian thought, paralyzed by a wave of terror, can such things be?

  The service lasted less than an hour, and there followed then the ride, slow, even langurous, to the cemetery . . . the sense, more pronounced now than earlier, of floating through a dream, being borne, helpless and unresisting, to a horrific end. From the sidewalk people looked after them; children stared; Ian recalled the funeral processions of his childhood, and how they had filled him with dread. The very slowness of the vehicles had seemed unnatural. He could not remember when he had learned about death, its unspeakable finality; he wondered if, in the vanity of his absentmindedness, he had ever learned. His father had died when Ian was twelve but had been so long separated from the family, living in a distant state, the death had seemed belated; nominal; not even, though a suicide, particularly shocking. His mother had died when Ian was seventeen, of lymphatic cancer, so suddenly diagnosed, and so suddenly lethal, it had seemed hardly more real.

  Bianca said uneasily, “Aunt Katherine doesn’t seem very friendly, does she. I think she blames us for . . . what happened.”

  “What? For what?”

  “Oh, you know. It’s an unconscious sort of thing. Like we didn’t protect her or something. Mommy. Like we didn’t get the best doctor for her or something. The way people are when they’re upset . . . sort of primitive.” She paused. She said, “Aunt Katherine was always jealous of Mommy, you know. At least that was what I gathered from some things Mommy said. I guess a lot of people were jealous of her—women, I mean.”

  Ian, who was staring out the window, did not want to think of his sister-in-law, Katherine, still less of her tall stern husband, Richard. He did not want to think of what the vehicle in front of this vehicle held, its rear doors opening as the ambulance doors had opened: receiving its cargo, relinquishing it.

  Fell, mister?—or was pushed?

  In the Hazelton Memorial Cemetery, on stiff yet shaky legs, Ian and Bianca walked a short distance, most of it uphill, to the plot Ian had contracted to buy only the other day. The air smelled of green and of damp, of fresh unambiguous earth. There was no marker for Glynnis’s grave, but the grave, which is to say the rectangular gash in the earth, had been dug; was there: a category of being to which no helpful name could be assigned. For surely “hole” was inadequate.

  The pallbearers bore their heavy burden up the grassy incline, moving carefully: very carefully. Ian felt his shoulder muscles twinge in sympathy. It struck him as a matter of immense significance that the casket, containing, as it did, a human being, one of their party, should be so calmly surrendered to the earth, that no one was going to object, or think it queer.

  Without the scrim of the limousine’s dark glass the cemetery looked subtly different: the sunshine was rawer; the grass thickly threaded with dandelions; numerous birch trees, their roots cruelly exposed, appeared to be slated for demolition. The faces of Ian’s friends too looked raw, and less attractive than he recalled: aging, if not frankly aged; on the edge of being old. The pallbearers panted from their effort; Denis Grinnell wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  Ian realized something, suddenly . . . an elated stab, as of supreme wisdom. But he could not think what it was.

  Something he wanted to tell his friends?

  During the brief burial ceremony, so much more valedictory than the ceremony in the church, Ian had to resist the impulse, at times nearly physical, of looking around for Glynnis.

  He found himself looking at feet: at the women’s high-heeled shoes, at the men’s polished shoes; at legs, stockinged, trousered; at his own trouser cuffs, his shoes. His? He noticed that Bianca wore no stockings: was bare-legged, startlingly white-legged, in beat-up old shoes about which her mother would lament, How could you, Bianca?—at such a time?

  Glynnis’s coffin was being lowered into the grave: a sheerly mechanical process that aroused interest in the onlookers, as such processes usually do. Would it work, or would it break down at the crucial moment? The motorized whirring reminded Ian of the machines of incalculable precision that had kept Glynnis alive for so many days; for he saw now, and wondered at the opacity of his thinking, that of course she had been dead during much of the time he’d sat by her side, a deluded suitor. Had he really thought she would be returned to him and their life would continue as always?—as if nothing had happened?—seizing her shoulders as he had, in a paroxysm of murderous rage, and throwing her backward, helplessly backward, into death: into a sheet of glass. He had not known what he’d done but he had (and this was the paradox) intended it; he had not intended it (and this was the paradox) but he’d known what he did. There was something about a knife, a knife that had gone flying, and he’d cut his silly fingers on it, the sort of mad self-hurting thing one spouse does to get a point or two up on the other: You want to hurt me, yes fine hurt me, yes like this, I will help you goddamn you, like this. Afterward he’d come home to the devastation and soberly cleaned it up, looked for but did not at first find the knife: someone had carried it out into the kitchen, laid it on a counter. Who? One of the police officers? Ian himself? He could not recall, did not care, washed the dried smears of blood off the knife, returned it to its magnetized rack from Bloomingdale’s.

  Now the fingers and palm of his right hand were numb, as if with Novocain. You see, Ian told Glynnis, what you have done to me.

  Ebenbach was concluding his little talk. I loved him, I love him now, I gave him up for you—were such words possible, in terms of Ebenbach?

  If not Ebenbach, and Ian was beginning to doubt Ebenbach (for the man, though appealing, looked scarcely more virile than the inadequate husband), then, Ian wondered, who? For surely the man was present, would not have stayed away. A friend of yours, in fact. Ian looked covertly about but was distracted by Bianca leaning against him, rather heavily, and Roberta’s silent weeping, and the rivulets of tears on Meika’s powdered, rather too rouged cheeks; by the way the lower part of Denis’s face was stiffening, as if with a muscular spasm—and Denis’s tears too, which Ian did not want to see; and there was Vaughn Cassity’s fresh haircut, which was too short and unflattering to the man’s large, rather regal head. There was, however, Malcolm, handsome Malcolm, the stiff springy dark hair, the thick brows, the “sculpted” mouth—Malcolm Oliver. I loved him, I love him now, I gave him up for you. Malcolm was plausible: more plausible than Ebenbach.

  But there was Leo Reinhart, who had divorced his wife long ago and showed no interest in remarrying: handsome puckish Leo with his Italian-made clothes that fitted him tightly, but not too tightly. And there was Vincent Hawley. And Vaughn Cassity. And, not least, Amos Kuhn. A prominent man, a much talked-of man. I gave him up for you.

  In its snug grave the coffin was slightly tilted; one of the attendants deftly straightened it; the ceremony seemed to have ended. Was anything next? What was next? They were to be spared the literal burial, the dumping of earth upon the gleaming artifact, for which thank God; such a sight might do permanent damage to already strained nerves. Now that Ebenbach had relinquished his mild authority over the assemblage, things were coming loose, as if unglued; the day was revealed as an ordinary day, just as a holiday, awaited eagerly by children and extended beyond its significance, is onl
y an ordinary day after all; though fraught with danger. Ian tasted panic: what was there to say, where was there to go, what was there to do?—he looked around for Glynnis and could not find her.

  On their return to the graveled drive where their cars were parked, strung out, numerous and seemingly festive, as at a party, Ian realized what it was he wanted to tell their friends. It was a clear, simple thought, so simple it might be overlooked. He raised his voice to speak; he said, “Wait: do you know what this is?” They were walking in a loose informal group, speaking as if conversationally of the morning’s weather, and of Hazelton Memorial Cemetery, which was such an attractive place, and of the brunch planned at the Cassitys’—a variation of a funeral breakfast to which in a weak moment Ian seemed to have agreed, though now he doubted he could force himself to attend—and, since Reverend Ebenbach was not in their group and could not reasonably be expected to overhear, they spoke approvingly of him, and of the Unitarian service, which had been so tasteful and so moving—exactly what Glynnis would have wanted. “Wait: do you know what this is?” Ian interrupted. “Do you know what this is?” When he had their attention, and the attention of several others close by, he said excitedly, “This is our first death.”

  SO IT WOULD be repeated afterward, the words radiating outward in rough concentric circles from their core. Ian McCullough, the husband of, the one involved in, yes but what was it, what exactly was it, a woman walking through a plate-glass window blind drunk, or falling through a plate-glass window blind drunk, or had she been pushed, had they been fighting and had she been pushed, or had he killed her outright? . . . Yes but you must expect them to lie.

  He foresaw that even a posthumous being would not be possible.

  2.

  There began now an interlude of clockless days: soft time, Ian McCullough thought it. Time spilling beyond its natural boundaries of day, night . . . daylight, dark . . . wakefulness and the stupor of sleep.

  They had not taken him into custody at the cemetery: nor were they waiting for him back at the house, when he and his daughter returned.

  He thought, They respect death.

  He thought, They are waiting for me to go to them.

  He thought, Of course, my own death would be easier.

  “DO YOU KNOW what the Bardo state is?” Bianca asked. “The forty-nine days following death?”

  Drifting restlessly about the house as if, without the weight and stolidity of her mother’s presence, it was a house new to her, and dangerous with secrets, Bianca had discovered an aged paperback copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in a remote bookcase. The book, which had belonged to Glynnis in the 1960s, was faithfully annotated through two thirds of its length; then untouched, as if unread. The section called “Bardo of Karmic Illusions” was most meticulously marked.

  “The Bardo state,” Bianca read aloud, “is forty-nine days following death, during which time the soul is trapped in a dream-state, suffering from karmic illusions and nightmares. These images distract the soul from the purity of consciousness that means liberation from the cycle of birth and death so it’s necessary for the holy book of the Bardo Thodol to be recited by a lama in the presence of the corpse. . . .” She looked up from the book and stared into a corner of the room. Her voice had been halting, uncertain; though she’d meant simply to share this arcane knowledge with Ian (the bright curious daughter, the scholarly father), she seemed to have become rather intimidated by it.

  She wondered why the soul could not make its own way after death, why it required a guide. Why reincarnation—returning to the phenomenal world, getting born again, and again—must always be hell. “That isn’t a very encouraging vision of life, is it,” she said.

  She wondered aloud, “Why forty-nine days? Why not fifty, or forty-eight?”

  She sniggered, drawing the edge of her hand roughly beneath her nose. “Imagine sitting there and reciting to a corpse! All those days!”

  Ian said, “No. I can’t imagine.”

  She put away the book and talked of other things; bicycled to the cemetery, though she and Ian had been there only that afternoon; planned to go out with her friends; but returned early, at dusk, and sought out Ian in his study, where, with little success, he was making an attempt to work. (Though he would not be attending the Frankfurt conference and had no need to do so, he was revising his paper: “perfecting” it, as he liked to think.) The Tibetan Book of the Dead again in hand, Bianca insisted upon reading to him passages on the Chikhai Bardo, “the primary clear light seen at the moment of death”; and the Chonyid Bardo, “when the karmic apparitions appear”; and the Dharma-Kaya, “the state of perfect enlightenment.”

  She leaned in Ian’s doorway, her pale skin glowing with a fervor he could not interpret. “This is how it begins, this is what the lama recites to the dying person at the very moment of death,” she said. “O nobly born: listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it, O nobly born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or color, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good. . . .” She read as if the words gave her difficulty, as if she were translating them as she went along. “What is hardest for me to understand, unless I don’t understand it right, is that the Buddhists believe that our moment of greatest lucidity is at death . . . at the very instant of death. And afterward, as the days pass, we sink back into illusion again, these karmic remnants, and things gradually degenerate, get crazier and crazier, as we approach physical rebirth.” She regarded Ian with her rather flat gray eyes, contemplatively yet urgently, as if this were a snarl of a problem which, together, they might unravel. “Of course you have to believe in reincarnation to believe in any of it, don’t you,” she said. “That’s a stumbling block to people like us.”

  Ian said, “Unless you read it as metaphor.”

  “Metaphor for what?” Bianca said suspiciously. Then: “I don’t want metaphor, I want the real thing.”

  Ian laughed and said, “Well.”

  Bianca stared at him and did not reply. She was leaning in the doorway, her forehead puckered; Ian saw, with a father’s attentive eye—or was it, Glynnis being gone, a mother’s attentive eye?—that she would soon wear out her face, her very youth, with such severe frowning. “Did Mother take this stuff seriously?” she asked.

  Ian considered the question. Glynnis had gone through phases of belief and commitment and skepticism, as they all had, though perhaps with more passion than most, in those terrible years of war abroad and assassinations at home; he could recall her immersion of some months in Buddhism, both Mahayana and Zen; her zazen meditation, in the company of other devotees, in the University of Michigan arboretum; her conversation, her reading, her . . . passion. “We tended to believe things while we were caught up in them,” he said. He paused, hoping Bianca would not misunderstand. “Then, afterward, we forgot.”

  “You moved on.”

  “We moved on.”

  YET BIANCA COULD not, it seemed, let the matter rest; began to frighten herself, and Ian, by wondering if Glynnis were truly dead.

  After all, you know. What if?

  Those ancient beliefs, those strange religions “people like us” dismiss as superstition: What if?

  One evening Bianca embarrassed Ian, not to say Roberta and Denis Grinnell, who had dropped by the house for a drink, by deflecting their questions (about her first year at Wesleyan, the friends she’d made, the final exams that still lay before her) and talking instead of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Mahayana Buddhism; how little people know of such things in the West; how little they want to know.

  “It forces you to think, doesn’t it,” Bianca said passionately. “I mean, it scares you half to death, the possibility that these beliefs might be right, and ours wrong. Reincarnation, for instance . . . being trapped in what they call the cycle of karmic illusion . . . being born again, and again, and again . . . and no escape.”

  Though Bianca
seemed to be making an effort to speak in the usual measured cadences of Hazelton-on-Hudson, like any bright young person hoping to impress her elders even as she learns from them, or, indeed, challenges them, they could see a thin film of moisture on her upper lip, and they could hear her breath. She panted as if she had run to them with urgent and incomprehensible news, to seek them out where they sat, drinks in hand, on the flagstone terrace overlooking the lawn.

  “They believe that the soul is still in the body after death. Forty-nine days after death. My God! Think of it!” She shook her head forcibly, as if to clear it. Her eyes were wide, staring, protuberant. “I know it’s impossible, but I keep thinking . . . what if she woke up somehow? Mother, I mean. Mommy. In that coffin. In that box? That we let them put her in? I know it’s crazy and of course it could never be but—well, what if it is true?”

  The adults stirred in discomfort. Ian made a faint sound as of pain. After a moment Denis said, “I don’t see any reason for you to torture yourself like that, Bianca,” in a father’s reproving tone, and Roberta said softly, “After all, dear—it is impossible.”

  “Yes,” Bianca said coldly. “I know.”

  Roberta went on to say—for Roberta Grinnell, Glynnis’s friend of fifteen years, her closest and dearest woman friend, may have felt something of Glynnis’s authority, here, at this moment, giving counsel to Glynnis’s daughter, and in any case she was a former psychiatric social worker—“The Oriental religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, aren’t they fundamentally life-negating? not life-affirming? Don’t they take the position that life is suffering, and that—”