American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It would turn out that the Thiel-Edwards arrest was a case of mistaken identity. The plainclothes police were looking for two suspected robbers, a white man and a black man (though in fact the “black” man had been described to police as a light-skinned Hispanic, with a mustache: Edwards was clean-shaven), who had held up a liquor store on Route 9. The thieves were reported having driven away in a late-model dark sedan; Thiel’s car was a 1986 metallic-blue Honda Civic. The five police officers involved in the episode insisted that there had been no brutality, nothing in excess of “necessary force.” Under oath, they testified to a grand jury that Thiel had allegedly driven his car into a police barricade and was himself responsible for his and Edwards’s injuries and for the damage to his car; more minor injuries were caused by scuffling, pushing and shoving, and “resisting arresting officers.” Though the case received a good deal of publicity locally and in The New York Times, and was taken up immediately by the state branch of the ACLU, no public explanation or apology was ever made by the Hazelton police; nor were the officers involved disciplined, other than to be reassigned to different units. Eventually, after months of stalling, a public hearing was held, sponsored by the ACLU, and the county prosecutor, Samuel S. Lederer, was finally prodded into action. A grand jury was convened, and the officers brought before it but the hearing was undercut by Edwards’s refusal to testify and Thiel’s obvious reluctance to provide jurors with information. Thiel told ACLU officers afterward (among them, Malcolm Oliver) that he had been “frightened and intimidated” by telephone threats from anonymous callers. Like his friend, he intended “never to set foot in Hazelton-on-Hudson again.”

  More than one hundred Hazelton residents, the majority of them active members of the ACLU, took part, for approximately an eighteen-month period beginning in April 1986, in a series of protests following the grand jury’s refusal to hand down indictments against the police officers. A petition was drawn up and signed; letters and telegrams of complaint were sent to relevant agencies, including the office of the Governor of New York and the district attorney general; a number of meetings were held in private homes, including the home of Ian and Glynnis McCullough. (Ian McCullough had been a dues-paying member of the ACLU since 1963.) Though police denied the association and, again, were to advance an excuse of “mistaken identity,” three state police officers went to the McCullough home in the early morning of September 21, 1986, where, under the pretext of looking for neighborhood vandals and without identifying themselves, they pounded on the front door of the house, waking the McCulloughs and upsetting them considerably. Though the officers shone flashlights into the house, they did not shine them on their own uniforms or badges, according to the McCulloughs. Afterward, they were to claim that they had only rung the doorbell and had gone away almost at once, without any further disturbance.

  Though Dr. and Mrs. McCullough were outraged by this act of harassment, and Dr. McCullough made a number of formal protests, by telephone, by letter, and in person—he insisted upon seeing, among others, the State Commissioner of Police—there was never any explanation for the officers’ behavior, other than their claim of having been looking for neighborhood vandals (teenagers had set off firecrackers in some mailboxes in the neighborhood earlier that night), nor was there any apology.

  Ottinger duly asked, “And do you think, Mr. Oliver, based upon your experience as an ACLU officer and your acquaintance with Dr. and Mrs. McCullough, that the Hazelton police were deliberately harassing the McCulloughs on the night of September 21, 1986?” and Malcolm said, “Yes, I certainly do,” and began to elaborate, speaking rapidly and angrily; for this was a subject about which Malcolm had long had passionate feelings, whether altogether justified or not. Ian, blinking and squinting through a headachy malaise, like a tortoise peeping out of its shell, took pride in his friend’s testimony; felt a thrill of nervous elation in sensing the mood of the court and seeing, it seemed so plainly on their faces, the mood of the jurors. For everyone, or nearly everyone, was swept up in Malcolm Oliver’s dramatic recital of injustice and inveigled into, as if by the back door, a tacit sympathy for Ian McCullough. Why, the man was a martyr!—a local hero!

  Ian thought, But I did so little. Thiel and Edwards would not even know my name.

  There followed then Samuel Lederer’s crudely aggressive cross-examination—for the man was very angry—which allowed Malcolm Oliver to demonstrate his own lawyerly talents. One-on-one combat, here as on the squash court, excited him and enlivened him; he got the better (or so Ian sensed from the amused response on all sides) of the public prosecutor at every turn. “Do you have any proof that the Hazelton police, collectively or as individuals, were involved in a ‘vendetta’ against Ian McCullough?”

  “I am basing my judgment on my experience of nearly thirty years involvement with the—”

  “Mr. Oliver, do you have any proof, I am asking do you have any proof?”

  “—with the law-enforcement agencies of the state and with the alleged upholders of the law like yourself.”

  “Mr. Oliver, I am asking you, what proof do you have?”

  “‘Proof’ could only be supplied by police testimony, and, as all the world knows, no officer will inform on his fellow officers, under pain of—”

  “Mr. Oliver, for the last time, I am asking you, what proof can you—”

  “—censure, harassment, maybe even brutality, who knows?” Malcolm said sharply, before Judge Harmon could cut him off. “Only they know, and they won’t tell.”

  THAT EVENING, SHORTLY after Ottinger dropped Ian and Bianca at their house, the telephone rang; and it was Vaughn Cassity. With whom Ian had not spoken in weeks.

  He had heard, Vaughn said, in a hearty, belligerent voice, that Nick Ottinger had had a brilliant first week, that things were looking very well for Ian at last. Why didn’t they, then, all go out to celebrate tomorrow night? “You and your daughter, of course, and Nick, and Meika and me. What d’you say?”

  “Celebrate?” Ian said. “Surely it’s a bit premature to celebrate.”

  “My party. I insist. That new seafood restaurant in the village. What d’you say?”

  “I really don’t think . . .”

  “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had time to get up to the courthouse, but Meika tells me your defense counsel is winning every round now, or nearly. Meika tells me it looks very, very good. Don’t read the damned papers, says Meika, they give you the wrong impression!” When Ian made no reply Vaughn went on, still belligerently, “And I’m lonely, these days. D’you know what it is, Ian, to be lonely? Married and lonely?” He mumbled to himself; perhaps he was laughing. It sounded as if the telephone receiver had been dropped. “Though I guess you wouldn’t know, would you. Since you’re not married now. You’re of widower status. And you’re not lonely.”

  Ian stood mute, accused. He felt a quick stab of pain between the eyes. He had the strange, unsettling idea that Meika was standing close by Vaughn, or was even, slyly, on another extension, listening in on her husband’s call.

  Vaughn said, “Hello? You there? Ian? Still there?”

  Ian said, “Yes.”

  “Hell, Ian, I know you’re going through . . . hell. Whatever happened with you and poor Glynnis, it was just something that happened. It wouldn’t happen again. Right? I’ve had a little too much to drink but I think I can make myself clear. Right?” He paused; Ian could hear him breathing. “Meika, are you on the line?” he asked suddenly.

  There was no reply.

  Vaughn said, “Meika, are you?” He waited, and again there was only silence. “Bad puss, if you are.”

  Ian said, embarrassed, “Vaughn? I don’t think I can make it tomorrow night. But thank you.”

  “Another time, then? When the trial is over? When you’re acquitted? Free and clear? We can all go out, then, right, and celebrate? Not like it would be hubris then, or anything. Challenging the gods. Once you are acquitted.”

  “Yes, fine,” Ian said, desperate to
get away.

  “You’re my friend too, you know.”

  “Yes,” said Ian.

  “We’re all friends. We don’t judge. Fundamental principle of civilization.”

  “Yes.”

  “When you die, you die alone. But when you live, you can’t live alone. Can’t bear to live alone.” He paused again; again there was a sound of mumbling, or laughter. Perhaps it was sobbing. “I’ve been exploring some of these problems—I call them ‘problems’; to an artist all substance not yet given a structure represents a ‘problem’ to be solved—in my Poetics, of course. You saw my Poetics, didn’t you? Back around Christmastime.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t talk now, Vaughn. Bianca and I have only just arrived home—”

  “Let’s make it another time, then. You and your daughter, and Nick Ottinger, and Meika and me, shall we? Celebration dinner. Vaughn’s treat. Right? Shall we?”

  “Yes,” Ian said quickly. “Yes, good. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  7.

  On the night of March 29, near midnight, Nick Ottinger telephoned Ian McCullough and said, in a voice that fairly trembled with excitement, “Ian, I have a surprise for you, can you guess?” and Ian, who had been sitting in the darkened kitchen of his house, drinking Scotch and thinking of his wife’s snow-covered grave, which he had not visited in weeks, and of Sigrid Hunt whose face was now a dim dreamy blur in his memory, said at once, “Sigrid Hunt. You’ve found her.”

  And so it was.

  SINCE THE START of Ian McCullough’s trial there had been rumors, some of them very public indeed, that Sigrid Hunt—“the Missing Woman,” “the Mystery Woman,” “the ‘Other’ Woman”—would appear: initially, to testify for the prosecution; then for the defense. Concurrent with these rumors, though antithetical to them, were rumors that Sigrid Hunt was dead, had (in fact) been murdered. (And if Hunt had been murdered, who was the “likely” murderer?)

  So, on the morning of April 4, when Sigrid Hunt did at last appear in court, taking the witness stand beside the judge’s high bench as naturally—which is to say as hesitantly and as self-consciously—as any other witness, there was a truly palpable air of excitement and anticipation in the courtroom: crude, melodramatic, yet contagious; an assumption too, particularly among the press, however erroneous and however frequently denied, that the defense had timed its coup deliberately. (But this was not the case. Sigrid Hunt had only just been contacted, by a private investigator in the hire of Nick Ottinger, the week before, in a coastal village west of Guadalajara, Mexico; Ottinger had then been required to spend a total of four hours talking with her on the telephone, to convince her that she was in no way under arrest or in violation of any state statute, before she agreed, and then with reluctance, to fly back for the trial.)

  An extra row of benches had been reserved for the press, and television camera crews and photographers crowded about on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, waiting, with a determination and a sort of defiant communal cheeriness Ian rather admired, for those confused, fleeting moments when the “principals” appeared. The heightened interest today was of course focused upon Sigrid Hunt and not on Ian McCullough; or, if on McCullough, it was minimal and cursory; for the man’s tall spare rangy “professorial” frame was familiar to the regulars by now, and his face, and now silvered hair, yet more familiar and unyielding of dramatic surprise. Over the long months, Ian had grown not only accustomed to but philosophically accepting of the childlike appetite of the press for material, substance, essence, life; its elaborate formal structure existed, in contradistinction to Vaughn Cassity’s Poetics, a priori, and must be filled. Glynnis had told him, following one of her television interview shows (it had consisted of an eight-minute sequence requiring approximately six thousand miles of air travel) that the thing most dreaded on network television was silence. Not the collapse of a performer, or even his death, for that could be accommodated by the media, if not energetically exploited; but, simply, silence. So with the newspapers’ blank pulp pages, which must be filled.

  He had spoken himself only briefly with Sigrid Hunt, and that over the telephone; he had not much wanted to see her and had not been much moved by Ottinger’s relaying of messages from her, to him, to the effect that she was sorry for her behavior and asked to be forgiven. (“Why didn’t she ever write to me, in all these months, then,” Ian said indifferently. “She says she did write, but couldn’t mail the letters,” Ottinger said. “She says she has saved them all.” Ian allowed himself the indulgence of an expletive for which there is no genteel equivalent: “Shit.”)

  But they spoke, finally, on the telephone, and the conversation was not very satisfactory. Hearing her voice, which was so thinly nervous and agitated he would not have recognized it, Ian felt little excitement and even less resentment; rather a dull flat vague clinical curiosity about what the young woman would find to say to him, after so long. And of course she’d said she was sorry, so very sorry; simply could not express in words how sorry, et cetera; then asking, “Oh, Ian, is it terrible, those people, all those crowds of people, those strangers, that you can’t control, staring at you, and thinking about you, and judging you?” and he’d realized she was asking not of Ian McCullough’s ordeal but of her own, the ordeal shortly to be hers. He said, “Yes. It is terrible.”

  “AND WERE YOU ‘involved’ with Dr. McCullough during this period of time?”

  “If you mean romantically involved—”

  “Romantically, sexually—”

  “I was not.”

  “You were not?”

  “I was not his lover. I was not his friend, really. Though I would like to have been. I would like to have been a friend to them both . . . I admired them both so very much.”

  Sigrid Hunt gave her testimony in a voice that occasionally wavered but was, for the most part, steady, calm, and audible, fixing her attention for nearly two hours on Nick Ottinger, as if oblivious of others in the courtroom, except, from time to time (such times as she faltered in her speech), glancing at Ian McCullough, seated only a few yards away . . . a look of appeal, of, oddly, hurt: for he had been very chill in his greeting and had stared at her, and stared at her now, as if she were a stranger to him.

  Yet he thought, She has come back from the grave to save me.

  Or was it rather—and he did not understand this either—she has come to save me in my grave.

  Sigrid Hunt was still, though perceptibly changed, a young woman of unusual beauty, with her dead-white skin, her quaintly asymmetrical features, the way in which, not at all stiffly but with a pose of utter naturalness, she held her head, her shoulders, her arms. Oversized plastic-framed glasses, with tinted lenses, made her features appear the more finely cut, as if in miniature: the elegant nose, mouth; the “widespaced” eyes; the rather high narrow forehead; the tips of the exposed ears. She had brushed her long glossy red-gold hair back severely from her face, and parted it in the middle of her head, and coiled it up, at the nape of her neck, in a chignon; she wore a black costume—for Sigrid Hunt was the sort of woman upon whom clothing is not mere clothes but costume—of some soft wool fabric, an overblouse and a skirt that fell to mid-calf; no earrings, no necklaces, no bracelets, no rings. How tall she was, and how odd, teasing, fascinating, the asymmetry of her features, which had the look of being willed and not accidental, like nature. Ian thought of Modigliani and of Parmigianino; he stared and scarcely heard what she was saying, though all that she said was about him and for him.

  Whether by way of the defense counsel’s skillful questioning or by way of the repentant young woman herself, there now unfolded a narrative in which Ian McCullough emerged in yet another mode of being, rather more victim than agent: a person of enormous sympathy and generosity, though perhaps something of a fool. For Sigrid Hunt confessed both to “admiring” and being “very attracted to” Ian McCullough even as she confessed to “hoping to manipulate him” for her own purposes.

  “I was desperate
then. I was rather crazy. I’m not at all proud of that time in my life, and I look back upon it with loathing. I had been involved with a man, in love with a man, who wanted to marry me and wanted me, as he said, to have his son, though at the same time he often spoke of killing me and of killing himself. ‘We can’t be any more miserable than we are now,’ he’d say, ‘if we were dead.’ And though I knew this was madness I saw the logic of it, so to speak. I saw the logic of it quite clearly. At the time. But I was desperate, also, to get free of it . . . of him. There has never been a time in my life when I have not felt a profound sense of shame for what I seem to be doing, a sort of role I seem to be performing, that isn’t me, truly isn’t me, but a sort of mask I am wearing, yet of course it is me since it can be no one else after all. And this was one of the most shameful times. . . .

  “I should also say that, at the time I became involved in this love affair, I was feeling ill-used and embittered about losing my job at Vassar. I had been hired to teach dance; I was what’s called an adjunct instructor, which means expendable; and so I was. But that doesn’t have any bearing on this situation; it certainly has nothing to do with Dr. McCullough or his wife, whom I met around this time, through artist friends in Hazelton: Glynnis McCullough, who was so lovely to me . . . for a while. I liked her very much; there are some women, not many, whom I like immediately and enormously, as if they are larger than life, sort of . . . Amazonian; but it’s usually just in my imagination.

  “Mrs. McCullough was one of these women, and she seemed to take to me too for a while, as I said, introduced me to friends of hers, some very nice women friends, all of them her age, older than me, of course; and I liked them, too, and felt some sort of . . . envy, I suppose . . . jealousy . . . that their lives were what they were, and mine was what mine was: so shabby, by contrast, and so stupidly desperate. I felt—oh, I’ve always felt, so often!—I felt I deserved more. I envied them their marriages, and their families, and their expensive houses, which they took for granted, or so it seemed.