American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He tried not to think of Bianca and of Meika in the same dimension at all.

  IAN HAD KNOWN, he supposed, that, over the years, Meika Cassity had been . . . interested in him; but it was difficult, given the rhetorical nature of certain of his friends’ beliefs, to distinguish what was genuine from what was merely playful, whimsical, or frankly spurious. If a woman in Hazelton talked of the “politics” or “consciousness” of women’s liberation (as, frequently, Glynnis herself had talked of such matters), did it invariably mean that she believed herself liberated, did it mean that she was sexually adventurous, or did it in fact mean nothing at all? Ian had only vaguely concerned himself with such things because, married as he was to Glynnis and deeply immersed in his work, he simply hadn’t time; sexual adventures were not his style. Or had not been.

  Thus the affair with Meika Cassity, beginning abruptly as it did, and, in time, to end abruptly, had the resonance of a dream: a dream’s air of highly charged potency and meaning. The week before Christmas, Ian had driven to the Short North Rehabilitation Center to teach his Thursday evening class, only to discover, to his disappointment and chagrin, that only one student had troubled to show up: Mrs. Myrna Castle, a heavyset black woman with a sweet shy gold-toothed smile, dressed as if for Sunday, the least confident of his students and the one most despairingly hopeful of learning to read. (It was Mrs. Castle’s desire to be able to read, before she died, the Holy Bible, and to be able to deal with supermarket ads and coupons.) Ian spent ninety minutes with Mrs. Castle, going through adult primer material unfamiliar to her—in class, Ian always dealt with new material since, otherwise, students would memorize assigned material and appear to be reading when in fact they were not. The lesson went slowly and painstakingly. Mrs. Castle forgot words she knew, sometimes misreading the same word in a single paragraph or seeing “they” for “the,” “our” for “are,” and while Ian lost himself rather pleasurably in the effort of teaching her, as if immersed in an element challenging, if not alarming, to each, like a patch of quicksand, the mood quickly faded when the lesson ended. It was then that he had to drive back to Hazelton-on-Hudson, in the dark, to resume, with dread, his own life. He did not know if what he did at the Short North could be considered teaching; someone had spoken rather derisively of it, not long before: Denis, probably—Denis was becoming, of late, less and less tolerant of what he called cheap liberal conscience-placating gestures—and he thought of Mrs. Castle and felt a helpless sort of pity for her, the tinge of conscience (for of course Denis was correct, though cruel in being correct) a white man of his class and status might naturally feel for a black woman of her background, her hard luck, her fate. Ian had assumed that Myrna Castle was older than he, but she was in fact two years younger: a former alcoholic, a serious diabetic, the widow of a man who had died in prison fifteen years before, grandmother of seventeen living children and mother of nine, one of whom, her best-loved boy as she called him, was in the state penitentiary at Dutch Neck. Serving two life sentences, Mrs. Castle told Ian, for a deed he had not committed but a friend in his company that night had committed, the both of them serving the very same sentence: is that justice? Mrs. Castle asked of Ian; and Ian could say only, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry to hear that, Mrs. Castle, but maybe he will be eligible for parole someday, and Mrs. Castle said, looking up at him with bright, angry eyes, Oh no he won’t Dr. McCullough, the law has seen to that.

  When, that night, Ian returned home, to the empty darkened house, to the house of death, he’d felt so low, so absolutely rotten, it was self-evident that there was nothing to be done with the remainder of the night (it was only eight-thirty) but to drink himself into oblivion, to get shitfaced smashing drunk. And the telephone rang, and it was Meika Cassity, inviting him over for a drink. Some friends have dropped by, Meika said, her voice light and melodic; we were thinking maybe we’d all go out to dinner; there’s that new seafood restaurant by the square, have you tried it yet? or do you have other plans?

  Ian laughed. Ian said, “I adore you.”

  THE CASSITYS’ OTHER guests were Leonard Oppenheim and Paul Owen, whom, Ian realized, he had not seen in months. Like a fool he said, unthinking, “I haven’t seen you in months . . .” even as he realized, from the men’s stiff smiles and expressionless eyes, and their conspicuous failure to get to their feet and shake his hand in greeting, that they were no longer his friends. They think I am a murderer, Ian thought, rocked back on his heels.

  Meika must have called him without consulting them; or, bent on mischief, as Meika so frequently was, she had called Ian under the pretense of not knowing how they felt. He was deeply embarrassed, wished he might turn around and walk back out the door.

  They were primarily Glynnis’s friends, Ian thought resentfully. They were never my friends at all.

  Leonard and Paul left the Cassitys’ after a polite five minutes, making their excuses, and Meika said, shrugging, after they were gone, “It’s just as well. They’ve become so dour, those two, they’ve lost all their sparkle and wit, and if gay men display no gaiety what is the point really of it all? I really do think there might be truth to the rumor . . .”

  “Meika,” Vaughn said reprovingly.

  “. . . that one of them is, you know, ill. Seriously ill.”

  “Seriously ill?” Ian asked.

  “Seriously ill,” said Meika. She regarded him with wide damp oyster-white eyes and a grave downturning of her mouth. “Or, that is, has tested positive for the disease.”

  “Meika,” Vaughn said, more sharply, “we don’t really know that that is true.”

  “You must mean AIDS,” Ian said, thunderstruck.

  “I think it must be Leonard who has it,” Meika said thoughtfully. “He has been looking so sallow lately and seems to have lost weight. But of course if one of them has it the other has it too. My God, it’s so ghastly, isn’t it? So sad.”

  “You really think that Leonard has AIDS?” Ian asked.

  “As I said, I think he may have tested—”

  “Meika, please,” Vaughn said, so exasperated he’d begun to laugh, “we don’t know that the rumor has any basis in fact. It is only a rumor, and you know what Hazelton rumors are.”

  “Yes,” said Meika, “I know what Hazelton rumors are. They are likely to be true.”

  “Since neither Leonard nor Paul has told us yet himself, I think we should do them the courtesy of keeping silent. It’s the least—”

  Meika laid a hand on Ian’s arm in mock restraint. “Ian won’t tell, will you, Ian?”

  “I—I’m very shocked. I hadn’t heard. I—”

  “You’re so innocent, off in your sequestered little world, you probably never hear much of anything anymore,” Meika said, slipping her arm through his and leading him to the mirror-backed Japanese cabinet where the liquor was kept. “Even about yourself.”

  “Meika,” Vaughn said again, reprovingly. “You know what you promised.”

  Meika laughed. She was looking unusually attractive tonight, really quite beautiful: her ash-blond hair curled gamine-style about her narrow face; her almond-shaped eyes, enlarged by mascara and shadowed in silver, warm, alert, and shining; her reddened mouth smiling and animated. Like Glynnis, Meika had always been a superb hostess, if less scrupulous than Glynnis—the elaborate food she served her guests was not inevitably, as she confessed, of her own preparation—she seemed to enjoy herself, at others’ parties no less than at her own, as much as Glynnis had. The two women had resembled each other in certain superficial ways but were, Ian thought, profoundly different. Perhaps it had to do with Meika being childless . . . and Vaughn so much her senior. (Vaughn was approximately fifty-seven, to Meika’s probable forty-five, and had been looking, of late, rather older, his skin dry and lacking in tone, with a curious stippled appearance: as if he were precariously convalescent, though Ian had heard of no illness.)

  It had always seemed to Ian that the Cassitys were the most mysterious of their friends, since, in their sociabili
ty, there was something both profligate and withheld; in their presentation of themselves—as, in society, we are continually “presenting” ourselves—there was something indiscriminate yet calculating. It was generally known that Vaughn, as a young architect, had met Meika during a visit to Paris in the mid-fifties; that he had fallen in love with, “in adoration of,” Meika, at the time a fashion model—“But very young, and very naïve,” as Meika never failed to interject, “with no future at all ahead”—and had broken off his engagement with a girl back home, to pursue her, court her, make her his bride. Meika, seventeen at the time, was Parisian but not French: the daughter of an American foreign service officer (himself of Anglo-Irish blood) and a Belgian woman, a translator, who had elected to dissolve the marriage, and to return to Brussels, when Meika was a child of five. In a version of the story Ian recalled from years ago, when he and Glynnis were first introduced to the Cassitys and flattered at being told such presumably confidential matters, Meika’s mother had been an exotic beauty involved in some undefined way with French intelligence—that is, a wartime spy—which had to do somehow with her disappearance; for, in Meika’s account, the woman had simply disappeared: there was no trace of her. In another version of the story it was Meika’s father who had been involved in covert intelligence activities: for the CIA during the fifties, however, and not during the war; at the time Vaughn met Meika her father had in effect disappeared as well, though in one way or another he kept in contact with his daughter, who lived with a French bourgeois family, and supported her generously enough, it seemed. “Meika’s father set a standard to which other men must only aspire,” Vaughn frequently said, with a lover’s doting smile, even as Meika waved him into annoyed silence or pressed a cautionary forefinger to her lips.

  Vaughn Cassity had an excellent professional reputation without being of the very highest rank of American architects: the consequence, observers said, rather more of a lack of ambition than of talent; though, to be sure, the man was ambitious enough or would not have made the small fortune he had. Glynnis had thought him charming if, at times, rather willful and self-absorbed; he was famous in Hazelton for daydreaming while conversation swirled about him, and for murmuring mysterious expletives under his breath: “Well—!” and “You see—!” and “And now—!” with no recourse to others’ remarks. There was, or had been, a minor drinking problem; rumors of health problems, never clearly defined. Vaughn had always been kindly, if characteristically vague, in his relations with his friends, and seemingly devoted to Meika. The house he had bought for her, in Hazelton’s older historic district, was a beautiful red-brick Georgian of the size of a small mansion, furnished with antiques, to which, at the rear, Vaughn had added rooms of his own design, spacious, glass-walled, and aggressively contemporary, like the one in which Ian now stood.

  “What will you have, Ian? Scotch? Martini? Your usual dry white wine?”

  Dry white wine had been Glynnis’s drink. Ian said, “Martini, please.”

  So Vaughn made Ian a martini, and Ian accepted it with thanks and slightly trembling fingers, which he hoped no one would notice. Meika was watching him with a singular, flattering intensity: a hungry concentration. The perfume that lifted from her was sweet, heady, with an undercurrent of something astringent; she wore a long-skirted dress of white cashmere, beaded and sequined in gold and black, and high-heeled open-backed sandals, also gold. On both her wrists, which were very thin, she wore numerous gold bracelets; on her left, a jewel-studded watch with so darkly vitreous a face the numerals were invisible. “A Christmas present?” Ian asked, pointing, and Meika laughed happily, showing her perfect white teeth, and said, “You see, Ian is observant. Glynnis used to complain he wasn’t.”

  “It’s my Christmas present to Meika,” Vaughn said, smiling.

  “And it’s lovely,” Meika said, slipping her arms around her husband’s neck and kissing him on the cheek. “Absolutely lovely. I don’t deserve it, but then one never does deserve anything . . . nice.”

  “Meika is a Calvinist at heart,” Vaughn said, chuckling.

  They sat on a long, curving, elegant white couch: facing the fireplace, which was made of white marble, and massive; warmed by a splendidly burning fire—a fire of such lovely iridescent colors, Ian supposed it must be made of composition logs, artificial logs, and not the real thing. But it was splendid, nonetheless, and did not overheat the room.

  They drank their drinks, and Ian and Meika smoked cigarettes, and Vaughn teasingly brandished, but did not unwrap and light, a Cuban cigar, and the Cassitys’ Chinese girl brought out fresh appetizers, liver pâté and French bread, and generous hunks of Brie, and Gloucester, and Stilton cheese (“I love Stilton,” Vaughn said, smacking his lips; “it smells of unwashed feet”), and smoked oysters, and Christmas nuts of various kinds, and it was nearly eleven o’clock before Meika remembered dinner, but of course no one wanted dinner by that time, particularly not Ian. He had stuffed himself with Meika’s rich delicious food and had had two, or was it three, of Vaughn’s massive martinis, and looked happily from Meika’s smiling face to Vaughn’s, and from Vaughn’s to Meika’s, thinking, These people are my friends, these people understand. Since Thanksgiving, when he had been invited over for a drink, and not for dinner as he’d hoped he might be, Ian had seen disappointingly little of the Grinnells: he played squash with Denis on an irregular basis but had not spoken with Roberta or so much as seen her in weeks. The Kuhns were traveling in Africa but the Olivers were in town, and though Malcolm had spoken warmly of getting together over the holidays, Ian had heard nothing since. And he thought, with a stab of bitterness, as much for Glynnis as for himself, They had such a good time, all of them, at my birthday party.

  As if reading Ian’s mind, Meika interrupted a story Vaughn was telling about one of his eccentric millionaire clients and said, “You’ve heard, Ian, of course, about Denis and Roberta?”

  “What about them?” Ian asked.

  “Roberta isn’t simply out in Seattle visiting her sister,” Meika said. “I mean, she is, but it’s really the start of a trial separation.”

  “A separation?”

  “I thought perhaps you knew.”

  “A legal separation?”

  “You and the Grinnells have always been so close. You, and Glynnis, and the Grinnells.”

  “I didn’t know,” Ian said. His heart knocked against his ribs. “No one told me.”

  Ian thought, I should leave, and go at once to Denis’s.

  He thought, I can telephone Roberta; I will find out her number from him.

  But he did not leave; and the subject of the Grinnells, so abruptly taken up, was abruptly dismissed; for Meika had questions to ask of Ian, how legal matters were proceeding . . . whether Nick Ottinger was the hotshot people claimed . . . whether “that young woman” (Meika fastidiously shrank from pronouncing Sigrid Hunt’s name) had yet been contacted, and whether, if she returned for the trial, she would be a witness for the prosecution or for the defense. Ian shrugged and said he didn’t know. He did not seriously believe that Sigrid Hunt, were she to return, would testify for the prosecution, except, perhaps, as a hostile witness, but he saw no reason to tell Meika Cassity this.

  “Or is she dead, do you think?” Meika asked, looking rather too levelly at Ian. Her eyes, of no distinct color, a mild pewter-gray, sparkled with a febrile sort of innocence in the firelight.

  Ian said stiffly, “I don’t know.”

  “Ah, of course! You don’t know, how could you know!”

  Ian said nothing; Vaughn murmured, “Well!” as if in vehement agreement; for a moment no one spoke. Meika, who had tossed her cigarette into the fire, reached absentmindedly for Ian’s, burning in an onyx ashtray close by, and said, contemplatively, “There was a side to Glynnis very few of us knew, a jealous, fearful, vulnerable side. . . . That Glynnis of all people could feel jealousy, even envy, of others—of other women, I mean—endeared her to me. It made her, you know, so much more human. It made her
so much less perfect.”

  “Perfect?” Ian said. “Glynnis was not perfect.”

  He laughed, not bitterly, he hoped, and surely not ironically, and reached for his drink. “Hardly more than I am perfect, in fact,” he said.

  “Ah,” said Meika, smiling her sweet-sly smile, narrowing her eyes to slits as if she were suppressing laughter, “but you are.”

  And she reached out to give his hand a surprisingly hard squeeze, as if to reassure him.

  She said, “If you and . . . your young woman friend . . . were close, I mean simply close, as friends . . . I don’t blame you for not wanting to talk about her; our private lives must remain private. Some of the factual information printed in the papers, let alone the ‘anonymous’ opinions, have been grotesquely inaccurate, in a way insulting to us all. And, damn it, there is no recourse; no way for us to collectively sue, for instance, the New York Post for criminal libel. Aren’t they bastards, though! All of them! Someone was saying, the other evening, Once the trial begins, it will be like a circus around here. . . . All of Hazelton is being scrutinized. And Glynnis was always so proud.” She paused, breathing rather hard. “You are our dear friend, Ian, and we love you—I speak for both Vaughn and myself, don’t I, Vaughn?—and we loved Glynnis, of course, and it is all so, so . . .”—for a painful moment it seemed to Ian that Meika’s composure might break, her carefully made-up face crease like a baby’s—“so unanticipated.”

  Vaughn leaned across Ian and touched Meika lightly on the knee. “Meika? Dear?”

  Meika said, ignoring him, “Like that terrible play . . . Lear, I think . . . in which some perfectly nice old bawdy man is blinded, his eyes gouged out onstage while you sit staring, unable to believe you are seeing what you see. And yet . . . there it is.” She had begun to tremble; a light in her eyes flared up, whether in grief or anger Ian could not have said. “I know I’ve had too much to drink,” she went on hurriedly, appealing to Ian, as if Vaughn were not present and regarding her with husbandly concern, “but I identify . . . so helplessly, and so strangely . . . with you, and with Glynnis. At first I must have been as stunned by the—you know—the event, the accident, the death, as everyone else; then, it seems, I entered into a period of . . . suspension, you might call it. But now, lately, I suppose it has to do with the holiday season and all the parties we’d have been going to, and giving, together, and Glynnis would have had one of her dinners I’m sure . . . and probably an open house . . . she had one on Boxing Day, the last three or four years; I’m sure she meant to continue it. And we would have had you here, of course; I never did reciprocate that lovely birthday party of yours. . . . We were so happy then, weren’t we! Vaughn was saying just the other night, It doesn’t feel like Christmas this year; something is missing.”