American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Denis said grimly, “I know him, I think. I mean, I knew him. Not that I could remember his face. . . . Bar Harbor, incidentally, is becoming impossible. As crowded as the Cape. And my brother has a half dozen in-laws staying with him.”

  Ian asked, after a moment’s hesitation, “How is Roberta?”

  Denis shrugged and said, “We keep in contact, and I know what she’s doing, more or less, but I don’t know, I must confess, how she is. I can tell you what, but not how.”

  Ian persisted. “Then what is she doing?”

  Denis squinted at him in that way he had, a grimace of a kind Ian associated with the squash court, smiling and frowning at the same time, both amused and annoyed. “Don’t you keep in touch, the two of you? Has she crossed you off her list too?”

  “Oh, I think so, yes,” Ian said, laughing. “A long time ago.”

  “No, you’re wrong. Roberta was tremendously relieved about the verdict. She wept, she was so relieved. She and Bianca in each other’s arms. . . . I wasn’t an eyewitness, but I was told.”

  “Yes,” said Ian. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “She was much more worried about it, the trial, even at the end, than most of us. But I assume you know that.”

  “Well,” said Ian, wondering what they were, so suddenly and aggressively, talking about, “yes.”

  As if Denis were being purposefully slow to answer Ian’s question, Malcolm leaned in and said, “Roberta is doing something really rather wonderful: she’s working in a public health program at Goldwater Hospital—you know, the one on Roosevelt Island—giving psychiatric counseling to AIDS victims.”

  Ian marveled at the news, though in fact he had heard it already, or a version of it: not Goldwater Hospital, surely, but New York Hospital. He said, “It is wonderful. It’s—”

  “It’s noble!” Denis said wryly. “Heart-wrenching!”

  “—it’s the sort of thing one might expect of her, though I can’t imagine how long she can bear it,” Ian said. He wondered how Leonard Oppenheim was but did not, at the moment, want to ask.

  Denis said, “My former wife didn’t think, evidently, that I was sick enough, or moribund enough, quite yet, to warrant her ministrations.” And the men laughed and clambered back down to the terrace, where Sigrid had set the table with stainless steel cutlery out of the house’s kitchen, and inexpensive china, and cloth napkins—for mere cheap crinkly paper napkins would have blown away. The centerpiece was a bottle-green vase in which branches of pale pink multifoliate wild roses had been placed, hanging down like ivy. “Beautiful,” the men said, staring.

  TEN YEARS AGO, Sigrid was telling them, she had danced in an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea by a contemporary American composer; not the lead, of course—“I was never to dance any lead, at any time, in my short-lived career”—but a quite good role, brief but spectacular: that of the doomed Princess Creon, Medea’s rival for Jason’s love.

  “The dance was choreographed to give the Princess more space than Euripides gives her,” Sigrid said, “so that, while Medea was certainly the central figure, Princess Creon did take the stage as a kind of rival: very young, very innocent, very self-absorbed. I wore my hair long,” Sigrid said, fanning her lovely golden-red hair with her hands, so that it rippled and shone in the sun and the men were, for a moment, quite lost in it, “and of course I was young, scarcely seventeen, while the woman who played Medea—our teacher, in fact, a brilliant dancer whose career seemed never to have flourished—was in her early thirties.

  “As you know, Medea is bitterly jealous of Princess Creon and kills her by sending her poisoned gifts, a golden diadem for her head and beautiful robes, and the Princess is so innocently vain, or”—and here Sigrid laughed lightly, shutting her eyes for a moment and shaking her head as if she were shivering, in a characteristic gesture Ian had yet to decode—“vainly innocent, she accepts the gifts immediately, and puts them on, and preens in front of a mirror, and dies an agonizing death. ‘The flesh melted from her bones,’ Euripides says, ‘like resin from a pine tree.’ She can’t remove the diadem from her head, and she can’t throw off the robes, they stick to her, and when Creon, her father, rushes in and tries to help her, he is stuck to her, too, and dies the same death.

  “First I danced in joy, then in dawning recognition, then in terror and agony, simulating the throes of death: a sort of orgasm, prolonged and hideous, of death, which offended some members of the audience (though no one seems to have walked out of any of the performances) but quite moved most of the others. My father came one night, alone, but thought my performance so ‘sickening,’ so ‘obscene,’ he refused to talk about it afterward. In fact he scarcely talked to me at all, afterward. ‘How can you do such things in front of other people, in front of strangers?’ he said. ‘How can you expose yourself so?’ He seemed in awe of me at the same time he was repelled.” Sigrid paused again, and again shook her head, as if rebuking herself. “Mainly he was repelled.”

  She stopped abruptly. Her dazzling white cotton shift, with its long sleeves and mock-lace bosom, through which they could see the pale tops of her breasts, made her look, for a moment, like a tall somber child in a nightgown.

  Ian said, “You’ve told me so little about your father.” He had spoken as if thinking aloud; their guests were slightly embarrassed.

  “Still, it was my triumphant hour, that dance,” Sigrid said. “Knowing, really feeling, how the audience was with me, how captivated, horrified . . . how in a sense they couldn’t keep any distance between us. It was the music, it was the story, it was,” she said, with a shy little flair of bravado, “me.”

  Denis said, “I’m sorry I will never see you dance, Sigrid.” He poured wine into all their glasses. “I assume it’s never?”

  “Never,” Sigrid said. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, where the wind was blowing it, in silky glossy tendrils, and smiled, as if with satisfaction, and said, “Look: will you have more? We drove all the way to Bangor to get the olive oil I used in this salad, the recipe called for Italian and all I had was something from the A & P . . . not of course that that’s all we got, in Bangor. But, still.” She remained seated but started the casserole dish around, to Denis, to Malcolm, to Ian, each of whom took another serving, bay scallops with fusilli, black Kalamata olives, roasted red peppers, lime juice, and basil, and the rich fruity oil. And Sigrid herself spooned a small portion onto her plate.

  Denis said, regarding her with frank interest, “It must be a strange sort of art, dancing. So mute, but so revealing. As your father said.”

  “Oh, everything is ‘revealing’ enough, isn’t it, in its way,” Sigrid said elusively.

  Ian uncorked another bottle of wine and wondered that his hands were not trembling. Or were they? Invisibly? He had not had a cigarette since noon of the previous day.

  THEY TALKED, AND Ian allowed his thoughts to scatter and to drift: less anxious now, now that they’d eaten, and he’d had a glass or two of wine, and he saw that, yes, of course, of course Denis and Malcolm and Sigrid were getting along beautifully, for why should they not, why, indeed, should they not? For after all they were adults, and Glynnis had been dead for many months. I will blow my brains out, Ian had said, smiling, to Ottinger, at one point during the jurors’ six-hour deliberation, or I will get married again and begin my life over. And Ottinger had clapped him on the shoulder as if they were, which they were not, very close, even intimate, friends, and said, You’ll get married again, Ian, all the signs point in that direction. And so they had. It was really quite extraordinary, how they had.

  He had, however, lost Bianca. You might say.

  Though Sigrid insisted it was probably only temporary.

  That kind of hurt, resentment, rebellion: probably only temporary.

  She’ll get over it.

  Will she?

  I was like that myself.

  Yes?

  Impulsive.

  Yes.

  But she’s an intelligent girl, clearly
a very intelligent girl. And idealistic.

  Oh, idealistic. To a fault.

  Still, it was a hopeful sign that, at last, Bianca had sent him a postcard from Bangkok, Krung Thep as it was called, a KodaColor photograph of the Gulf of Siam, at sunset. Spectacular flaming light upon the water, the sun like a fireball about to sink into the sea. I am fine, I am well, I hope you are well, please don’t worry about me, in fact I hope you will not direct your thoughts toward me. “In a moment of time perfect enlightenment is obtained.” Love, Bianca.

  The trial, which had seemingly lasted forever, had of course come to an end.

  But Bianca had not forgiven him. And he quite understood, he quite sympathized.

  By the time the defense rested its case, the prosecution’s case had been so severely undermined—both the police report and the medical report appeared to corroborate Ian’s story about the knife, for instance: the defense being, now, classically, “self-defense”—the routed Lederer had had to reduce the charge against Ian to a single count of manslaughter, in the desperate hope of getting a conviction. And Ottinger had passionately appealed to Judge Harmon to drop even this charge—that is, to dismiss the entire case, that his client might be spared the further indignity of waiting out a jury’s deliberations. But Ian had not, in a way, minded, had not much minded; being judged by a jury of one’s peers is an intriguing prospect from a philosophical point of view . . . an experience not many men and women undergo, after all.

  Sigrid had said, I will do anything for you.

  Rather fiercely and passionately: Anything.

  The hours during which the jury was out, deciding Ian McCullough’s fate or, in any case, a preliminary stage of his fate (for, as Ottinger reminded him, we can always appeal), were not unpleasant hours but, rather, hours of suspension; as if Ian were again by Glynnis’s bedside in the hospital; as if in fact he were in a comatose state himself, neither fully alive nor dead. One’s thoughts scatter, and drift . . . diaphanous as the most insubstantial of clouds.

  In a state in which one’s soul had not yet been judged, Ian thought, in the interstices of our moral lives, one can at least breathe!

  And in that state he thought, quite simply: I will blow my brains out, or I will marry.

  In the end, of course, the jurors trooped back into the courtroom with their verdict. And though Ian had vowed not to break down, regardless of the judgment rendered, as soon as the foreman said, “Not guilty, Your Honor,” he began to weep: hid his face in his hands in a paroxysm of relief and shame. Everyone crowded around him to congratulate him and to congratulate Nick Ottinger, as if the trial had been, all along, truly a game, a game to be won, at the cost of another’s loss: Mors tua, vita mea.

  In time, Ian shook the jurors’ hands, one by one, and thanked them, and was allowed to know, or to guess, by way of smiling innuendo rather than explicit words, that several of them seemed to have favored him all along, from the first; had never been impressed with the prosecution’s evidence. Is it possible? Ian wondered, aghast at the possibility. All along? From the first? Never . . . ?

  He shook Benedict Harmon’s hand too, and, with Ottinger and a few others, stood about chatting; for they were all professional men, successful men, husbands and fathers and citizens of Hazelton-on-Hudson; they understood one another. And it was a splendid April day, chilly, very windy, but clear, the kind of day that whets one’s appetite for all that life can offer.

  Sigrid had hugged him, had wept in his arms, saying, yet again, “How sorry, how sorry I am, Ian; will you ever forgive me, will you ever, ever forgive me?”

  And Ian, overcome with happiness, said, “My darling, there is nothing to forgive.”

  SO LONG, IN theory, had they been adulterous lovers that the actual circumstances of their first lovemaking—on the very night of the verdict of “not guilty”—seemed to them a confirmation of an old love and not the initiation of a new. There was a sense, too, of déjà vu, their eager reverent kisses and caresses, the urgency, the hunger, the wordless melting pleasure of their sexual union, a sense that they had lived this experience before, many times before, and would live it many times again. In a delirium of happiness in Sigrid Hunt’s rather strong arms, Ian McCullough thought, I have loved her all along; I have always loved her.

  He did not regret, in that instant, that Glynnis was dead. For Sigrid Hunt would not have been possible for him, had Glynnis not died.

  IAN SMILED AND uncorked another bottle of wine. Sigrid was cutting wedges of the kiwi cream pie and easing them, with some little difficulty, onto dessert plates. The men watched her long slender fingers as she maneuvered the knife, the pie, the plates, her smoothly filed nails that gleamed as if they were polished, but were colorless. She wore no rings except a band of hammered gold on the third finger of her left hand: an inexpensive ring Ian had bought for her, only a few weeks ago, in a tiny goldsmith’s shop in Rockport, Massachusetts, on their drive up to Maine.

  They were talking about Maine, and the end of summer, and how abruptly, in this northerly climate, the summer would end: in another few days, in fact. “The seasons careen by more quickly all the time, don’t they,” Denis said, sighing. “It’s exactly as our elders told us: time accelerates near the point of impact. It really does.”

  “Yet time is theoretically reversible,” Ian said. He had been silent for so long, the others looked at him as if he were obliged to say something crucial. “The mechanics of the cosmos, it’s said, can run as easily backward as forward, in the universes of both Newton and Einstein; the past and the future are allegedly fixed. But I have never understood this, and though I’ve had physicists explain it to me, I have never had the impression that they understood it either. Do you?” He looked at his friends and at Sigrid. “Do you understand it?”

  Sigrid lifted her stylish chunky glasses from the bridge of her nose and peered at him through the lenses. Her eyes were round and widened, glassy, lovely, shining: like a doll’s perfect eyes. She crinkled her forehead and laughed. “Do we understand what?”

  “The theory of time’s reversibility.”

  “That time runs backward?”

  “That it could run backward. Though I think, in fact, it never does.”

  Malcolm said, “I think it’s a fallacy. I mean, the applicability of the theory in everyday discourse. It has to do only with subatomic particles, not with—well, us.” He laid a hand on Denis’s forearm and a hand on Ian’s shoulder, as if in consolation. “It doesn’t apply to us.”

  “But to memory? Our memories?” Ian asked.

  “Bullshit, McCullough,” Denis said heartily. “Pass the wine.”

  “There is a letter of Einstein’s, a portion of a letter I’ve seen reprinted, in which Einstein speaks of someone, a friend, who has left ‘this strange world just before me.’ But it’s of no significance, Einstein says. For the convinced physicist the distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, ‘although a persistent one.’” Ian paused and drew a deep breath. They were watching him, and for a vertiginous moment, there on the high parapet, he had no idea what he was saying or what he was doing or why. The splendid summer day was bleached of color, and even the pounding surf was silent. He had a vague glimmery image of Sigrid staring at him as if she had never seen him before.

  Then, in the next instant, time resumed, and Ian felt his blood beat again, warm and surging as always. “But, as I say,” he said affably, “I don’t understand any of it. I’ve always wanted to, and I know now that I never will. I am fifty-one years old.”

  “Oh Christ, McCullough,” Denis said. “Give us a break.”

  They talked for some time of Denis’s new position at the Arhardt Center in Washington, which he would take up in January: the challenge to him, as he saw it, to live in the midst of his ideological enemies without succumbing to them. “Dr. Max has assured me I can return to Hazelton whenever I want to, if I want to,” Denis said carelessly. “But I know I can never come back. And what about you, Ian? Are
you really resigning? I think you’re a fool, if you do. You were acquitted, after all.”

  Ian said quickly, “It has nothing to do with that.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Only that Sigrid and I think it would be better for us to leave Hazelton. To live somewhere else, anywhere else. Surely you can’t disagree.”

  “If you could get another position as good—”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t likely.”

  “Hasn’t Dr. Max tried to talk you out of it?”

  “He has; he’s been very kind, very considerate, of course, but he’s retiring in another week or two. And his successor, as you know, is no friend of mine.”

  “He’s no one you know at all. No one any of us knows.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “One of the ‘new breed’ of historian,” Denis said, in a sneering sort of aside to Sigrid. “Be frank with me, Ian: are they forcing you out?”

  Ian shook his head wordlessly.

  Denis said, “After all you’ve done for the Institute!”

  Malcolm said, “But, Ian, are you resigning? I’ve heard such different versions of all this. Where will you go? What will you do?”

  “He’s going to do independent research,” Sigrid said defensively. She laid, gently, a proprietary hand on Ian’s hand, a gesture that did not escape their friends. Sigrid Hunt’s hand, and Ian McCullough’s. There on the glass-topped table amid the wine bottles, the glasses, the dirtied steel cutlery. “He has a contract to write a book. About history.”

  Ian said, frowning, “I simply think it would be better for us all if I sold the house and moved away from Hazelton. My legal fees, for one thing. They’re rather more than Nick led me to expect. And Bianca, for instance—”

  “Where is Bianca?”

  “—is in Thailand; and when she comes back to the States she doesn’t plan to live with Sigrid and me. There is no need to retain a home in Hazelton any longer.”

  Denis said heatedly, “You were acquitted, for Christ’s sake!”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”