American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Approaching the squash courts, hearing their percussive, breathless sounds, smelling their characteristic smells, Ian felt his heart lift in expectation and in hope. It was June 22: for the next hour he would not be obliged to think of the fact that he had been arrested and charged with his wife’s murder; that newspaper headlines and articles and photographs (of a man identified as “Ian McCullough” and a woman identified as “Glynnis McCullough”) had luridly yet, in a sense, quite properly publicized the fact; that, despite his attorney’s protestations and what might be called community support, organized by certain of his friends and colleagues, the county prosecutor had decided to take the charges before the Cattaraugus County grand jury, which was now in its June session; that fifteen men and women, strangers to Ian, were, even now, as he and Denis took their places on the squash court and began their practice volleys, considering evidence in the case of People of the State of New York v. Ian J. McCullough. The grand jury’s sessions were closed, its procedures confidential. One day soon there would be a public announcement and further headlines: an indictment would be handed down or would not be handed down, and Ian McCullough would or would not be arraigned to stand trial for the murder of Glynnis McCullough. It was that simple. His fate existed outside him.

  That morning Denis played his usual fiery, impulsive game, hard-breathing and sweaty and crowding Ian rather more than Ian liked, winning points one after another, winning the first game, and the second, and, not quite so readily, the third. Ian played as he usually did, holding back, cautious, then throwing himself into inspired or, more usually, abortive outbursts of effort—it was true he was badly out of condition, breathing through his mouth after ten minutes, his heart hammering, his reflexes slow. But with each game he gained in confidence and made Denis, who had a tendency to wind down sharply after his initial expenditure of energy, work harder and harder for his points. Denis was a noisy, happy, gregarious player, bounding about, laughing at his own and others’ blunders, as fiercely competitive, Ian well knew, on the squash court as off, yet wonderfully boyish and direct. “Good shot!” he cried. Or: “Damn you, McCullough!” Denis’s face was as animated as his stocky muscular body, smiling, grinning, grimacing; his eyes shone with sheer pleasure, the frizzy crown of brown-gray hair above his forehead lifting like a rooster’s comb. Beside him Ian felt thin, leggy, uncoordinated, though his shoulder and arm muscles were well developed and his right wrist, like Denis’s, from years of squash, was perceptibly thicker than his left. After that accidental blow to Denis’s nose Denis had frequently teased Ian about being a dangerous man, often to others—“This is a man who can kill you with one swing of his racquet: be forewarned”—but since Glynnis’s death such teasing had abruptly stopped; of course it had abruptly stopped. That Ian McCullough was dead forever.

  But Ian sensed that, for all his joking, Denis did fear him, less, in fact, here on the squash court than when they found themselves alone together, or spoke on the telephone; as if there was something unarticulated between them that had to do of course with Glynnis’s death, for what in Ian’s life did not, now, have to do with Glynnis’s death? . . . Ian wondered: Had Denis been Glynnis’s lover, the man she’d loved here in Hazelton and claimed to have given up for Ian? One night when he had had enough to drink and felt he’d debased himself sufficiently to undertake such a task, violating a dead woman’s privacy as he’d never have dared—indeed, desired—to violate it while she was alive, Ian had made a quick anxious search of Glynnis’s things and found nothing; or, rather, he’d found everything: hundreds of letters, hundreds of postcards, Christmas cards and birthday cards and valentines and cards that exclaimed Congratulations! and anniversary cards To My Beloved Wife. . . . Some of these were signed with names Ian knew, or was fairly certain he knew; others were signed with the names of strangers. Of course Denis was there, Denis and Roberta both, and there may have been notes signed with the initial D., as there were notes signed with other initials, or mysteriously not signed at all. . . . In one of Glynnis’s disordered desk drawers there were numerous memos that appeared to be in her own hand, or in slovenly variants of it, notes to herself or codified transcriptions of telephone conversations, most of them illegible. Ian read them with fascination and a slowly intensifying sense of horror, thinking that the person who had written down these messages (with their air of urgency!) was not only, now, “dead” but no longer existed, in any sense; and the hours in which she’d lived, those hours through which they had all lived, were “dead” as well: had passed completely out of existence. Time was a sea in which a single enormous wave moved relentlessly forward, not bearing men and women along but simply passing through them.

  Ian gave up the search within an hour. Glynnis’s things in her absence had become—mere things. Her lover was hidden among them, faceless in a crowd.

  It was the final game of the final set, and Ian, belatedly rousing himself, began to play with more accuracy and ferocity; and Denis lost a point, laughed in surprise, and murmured, “You’re hot,” and lost another point. In a flurry of desperation, panting through his mouth, sweating, exhausted, bent at the knee, head lowered, a spectacle, he didn’t doubt, of a comical sort, Ian somehow managed to win the final game: his only win of the morning.

  He laughed, happy, seeing Denis’s face, that look of surprise and momentary disappointment, self-disgust, that in another instant would break into a congratulatory smile: only one game but it was the final game, and a significant game, and both men knew it. Denis wiped the sweat out of his eyes, and shook Ian’s hand warmly and hard, and said, “Well. I guess you’re back.”

  A posthumous victory . . . but so sweet.

  ON THE SQUASH court he sweated as nowhere else on earth.

  His pores exuded sweat like tears: rivulets of sweat down his sides and, stinging, in his eyes; the bridge of his nose so slippery with sweat that his glasses (though secured to his head by an elastic band) began to slide. Sweat, sweating: the very words gave satisfaction of a kind. Sweating like a pig; though less like a pig than Denis, who was heavier than he by at least fifteen pounds, soft flaccid flesh around the waist, ham-sized thighs not fat but compact, solid, a true heft to Denis’s swinging stride: the kind of man who, walking, gives the impression of always knowing his destination and of how to get there.

  On the court he sweated; in the shower he washed the sweat away.

  The very purposelessness of such actions, such contrary motions, gave him pleasure of a kind. He would not have wished to admit it, but the shower too, at the gym as at home, was rapidly becoming another of his sacred places.

  Under the shower, its nozzle emitting the needle-fine stinging spray that Ian preferred and the water as hot as he could bear, he shut his eyes and saw, fragmented as hypnagogic images, and no less graceful and unwilled, highlights of the triumphant game just played: Ian’s serves, Ian’s returns, Ian’s lucky shots, Denis’s misses. And fragments of other games came to him: tricky serves of Denis’s he’d managed to return, to Denis’s surprise; a protracted exchange, early on, Ian would have won had not the damned ball, struck at an unintended angle, sailed to the very top of the wall and hit the ceiling—“Fuck it!” Ian said. And there was that crucial moment in, had it been the second set, when he’d swung his racquet blindly but managed to connect with the ball, and hard, really hard, and Denis had nearly fallen on his face rushing to make the return. . . .

  How you men love your games, Glynnis had said. Your games that exclude women.

  Your games that are about being men together, excluding women.

  And it was true, though Ian had naturally denied it, that he felt his maleness, such as it was, most keenly in the presence of other men: in games of competition or their social equivalents. Since boyhood it had seemed to him that maleness was determined not by women but by other men. . . . What was the Greek heroes’ code? To help one’s friends, to harm one’s enemies. Maleness. A game. Its parameters shifting, its center always the same. Oh yes.

&nb
sp; He stood with his face lifted to the shower, hair plastered over his forehead. Hot water streamed over his body, and then, with a twist of the faucets, cold water, bracingly cold water: as if to stroke his flesh into oblivion.

  A shower is the very place, Ian thought, in which to slash one’s wrists. The blood would drain away immediately, since it is always present tense.

  But it was not a serious thought.

  He was thinking of a dream he’d had the night before . . . one of a number of thin, stray, wayward dreams, the product not of a deep and profound sleep but of a sleep contaminated by consciousness and memory: a dream of sexual desire and sexual frustration, acute as an adolescent’s. Glynnis stood naked before him, not as she’d been at the time of her death but as she’d been when they were first lovers, yet taunting and mocking him as she’d never done in life; and shifting, even as he reached desperately for her, into another woman . . . was it Sigrid Hunt? . . . a female body, female being, faceless, abstract, unnamed. How Ian had wanted to bury himself in her, nameless as she was—bury his blood-swollen penis in her—but more than his penis: his very soul!

  But he woke, and the dream abruptly faded. His rodlike penis throbbed with desire, shameful to him, like an old remnant of a lost self: this too, rapidly fading. Self-loathing washed over him; its sourness coated the inside of his mouth.

  The needle-thin spray had gone very cold. Ian’s teeth began to chatter; his genitals withered, retracted; gooseflesh dimpled his body. He turned off the shower, dried himself roughly, entered the crowded locker room with a towel around his waist. Without his glasses he blinked myopically and innocently, under no obligation to recognize anyone or to note that others seemed not to recognize him.

  At such times he had always felt uneasy, absurdly exposed and vulnerable; since boyhood it had seemed to him (and seemed so still) that others, boys and men, inhabited their bodies in a way that he did not. And now of course that the scandal had so publicly broken around him, this “Ian McCullough” that was both him and not him, he knew that other men regarded him with special interest, with curiosity if not frank repugnance: even those who had always liked him; even, he supposed, those who thought the charges against him unjustified. He moved among them as if he were one of them—note the bare feet, the dripping hair, the towel tucked adroitly around the lean waist—but he knew himself a terminally ill man to whom individuals felt themselves obliged to be kind, but not at all obliged to seek out.

  How Glynnis would be hurt, and incensed, at this diminution of my popularity, Ian thought. For of course it reflects upon her as well.

  Dressing hurriedly, yet with unusual clumsiness, Ian listened to Denis on the other side of the row of lockers: the deep-chested baritone voice, the explosive laughter. . . . To whom was he talking? Ian did not recognize the other man’s voice. Denis was enormously well liked in Hazelton, at least by men in no way his professional rivals, primarily because he was so easily amused, so ready to laugh: taking and giving pleasure by way of his laughter. No one quite like Denis! Glynnis used to say with an enigmatic smile. She had been fond of Denis, and he had certainly been fond of her: very likely attracted to her, sexually, romantically. That could scarcely have been avoided. But had the two of them been lovers? Would they have dared . . . ? Ian envisioned his friend’s broad hairy body lowering itself over his wife, the woman who was his wife; and that woman reaching up playfully, greedily, as she had so often with Ian, to draw him down to her. Yes. Good. Hurry. Like this.

  Ian writhed in excited revulsion. It was impossible to believe, he thought, yet, in his mind’s eye, so brutally vivid.

  HAD HE NOT seen Glynnis, once, years ago, talking earnestly with Denis, in the vestibule of someone’s house . . . and had not Denis’s characteristic expression of sociable mirth and expectancy been gone, in its place a look of hapless worry: a look, Ian had almost thought, of husbandly anxiety? Seeing Ian, Glynnis had smiled a quick radiant smile and made a gesture, extending a beringed hand to him, opening her arm in a semblance of an embrace, as if to say Yes, you too, I want you both, and the awkward moment passed: passed over, if Ian remembered correctly, into good-natured bantering. They had all had a fair amount to drink, Denis in particular; for some reason he’d come alone to the party. . . . Unless that had been another evening, another party. There had been so many, after all.

  I love you anyway, Ian thought. Both of you. I don’t care what has passed between you.

  AS THEY HAD done numberless times in the past, they ate lunch in the Institute dining room, Ian McCullough and Denis Grinnell, and Malcolm Oliver came to join them, and the conversation was brisk, unforced, pleasantly general: Institute matters, Hazelton news, talk of mutual friends, acquaintances, colleagues, plans for the future. Malcolm was leaving for a two-week tour of Argentina to do a piece for Life, and Denis was leaving the next day for a week in Zaire: he was an economic consultant for the State Department and had some connection, perhaps not entirely official, with the Arhardt Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I don’t subscribe to their politics, of course,” Denis said defensively, “but this is such an excellent opportunity for research, I really can’t pass it by.” Ian listened to his friends’ plans—which, like all plans that involve flying to distant parts of the earth, had a happy, celebratory tone—and felt only the mildest stirring of envy, or hurt. He had been one of them, once. Now he was posthumous; his life contained no future.

  Eventually, for such questions could not reasonably be avoided, Denis and Malcolm inquired after Bianca, and Ian told them that his daughter was well: not adding, for of course it would only sound self-pitying, that she was as well as might be expected under the circumstances. (In fact Bianca had returned from Wesleyan exhausted and undernourished, so obsessed with taking examinations and writing final papers she’d forgotten, she said, to eat and simply hadn’t time for sleep; which hardly mattered, did it? since she’d done so unexpectedly well: all her grades A or A-minus.) They talked for a while of Denis’s sons, both away with summer jobs; and of Malcolm Oliver’s seventeen-year-old son; and Ian made an effort to listen, but his thoughts drifted onto Bianca: at home now for the summer, living so strangely alone with him, the two of them in that house, that house of absence, each of the rooms defined, it seemed, by absence, by the fact that a presence had vanished from it . . . as if the old folk superstition of “hauntedness” really meant “absence.”

  Bianca had not been seriously ill, she’d insisted, only “worn out”; now recovered, or nearly, working at a summer job with the local YM-YWCA. Ian told his friends about the summer job but did not tell them that Bianca, once so happily combative, so, in Glynnis’s words, prickly spirited, was now quiet, subdued, even submissive: spending her spare time reading Buddhist literature and talking, God knew how seriously, of making, some day, a “pilgrimage” to Kyoto. (Glynnis had had the identical notion, years ago. Glynnis and certain of her Zen-minded friends. But nothing had come of it of course and, when, eventually, the McCulloughs had traveled to Japan for an academic conference, they’d stayed for two days at the Kyoto Hilton, made quick visits to the shrines. Beautiful, Glynnis had said passionately; so peaceful! And that was all.)

  Ian glanced up. Dr. Max and three other men were passing by their table without acknowledging them; without, it seemed, seeing them. The director’s ruddy face was crinkled in mirth; the men were laughing about something; it was remarkable, Ian thought, how much laughter one heard, in the Institute dining room, at such designated times. One of the men was Homer Taylor, the older colleague of Ian’s who had called, the evening of Glynnis’s accident, to invite him to lunch.

  Of course, since Glynnis’s death, all talk of Ian McCullough as the next director of the Institute had stopped. In that too he knew himself posthumous.

  It was not yet twelve-thirty but Ian and his companions were finished with their lunches; men eating alone together, without women, eat notoriously fast. Let’s have three more beers, Denis suggested. And Malcolm agreed, a
nd Ian said yes, good, why not? Now that the anxious malaise of his life had settled over him like a low-lying mist, in which even familiar objects are obscured or given a malevolent cast, he set more store than he would have wished to acknowledge on precisely such occasions: casual, improvised, spontaneous.

  As if he had only now thought of it, and brought the subject up with some reluctance, Malcolm asked Ian how “the case,” as he called it, was developing. So rarely was Ian asked this question, particularly in so point-blank a way, he hardly knew how to answer: the grand jury’s hearings were closed, after all; it was primarily, for the defense, a matter of waiting.

  Malcolm said, glancing at Denis, who indicated by his downward gaze that he was out of the conversation or wanted nothing of it, that he’d been hearing various things about the prosecution’s approach: no more than rumors, of course, nothing substantial. “You know,” he said, with a twitch of a smile, “what Hazelton is like.”

  Do I? Ian wondered. “What sorts of things have you heard? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “Well. About the girl, for one thing,” Malcolm said uncomfortably. “All this emphasis they intend to place on the girl.”

  “The girl?”

  “The young woman, I should say. Sigrid Hunt.”

  Ian drank beer, stiffening: thinking—or rather, not thinking, for his response was sheerly physical, emotional—I will say nothing about her; I will not even deny her.

  Malcolm said, “I met her, you know, just briefly, that evening at your house. That large party back in . . . I forget when. Last fall. And June seems to have met her at some sort of luncheon Glynnis arranged. My initial impression of her—that is, my only impression—was that there was something desperate about her, even then. In her face. Her eyes. But something certainly attractive. And, Christ, that man she was with, that ‘Egyptian fiancé,’ as he’s described in the papers: he was looking at me as if it wouldn’t have taken much for him to attack me . . . and I wasn’t doing anything but talking to her. I remember him as clearly as I remember her.”