American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “It has a good deal to do with it!”

  “But Glynnis is dead.”

  Denis stared at Ian as if he had said something obscene.

  Sigrid said quickly, linking her fingers through Ian’s and gripping them hard, “Ian has a contract with the Harvard University Press, to write a book. What is the subject, Ian? Nineteenth-century theories of—”

  “An overview of historiographical theory,” Ian said, embarrassed. He wished that Sigrid had not brought the subject up so casually; it meant too much to him. He said, smiling, quite explicitly changing the subject, “And, as I don’t doubt you know, others have approached me about writing books, signing contracts. My ‘experience’ as a man who has been tried for murder.”

  “Yes,” said Sigrid, “and I’ve urged him to consider it, seriously. An editor—”

  “Sigrid, it’s too absurd.”

  “—with an excellent New York publisher, a high-quality house, wrote him a remarkable letter, a really intelligent and sympathetic letter,” Sigrid said, looking at Denis and at Malcolm, as if to enjoin their support, “urging him to write a sort of memoir, a meditation, with facts of course and background information: a journal of his experience and an analysis of its effect upon him, and his family and friends, through the months. The editor said that no one has ever seriously attempted a project of this kind: something in depth, in a European style; it could be a unique and important document that would”—Sigrid paused, sensing Ian’s annoyance; he had withdrawn his hand from hers, was slapping at his pockets for cigarettes that weren’t there—“tell what it is like, from the inside, to endure a trial. And that the trial would be representative, of course, of the various trials we all endure, and their effect upon people around us.” And here, again, breathless and passionate, Sigrid paused: too intelligent a young woman, for all her bravado, not to register the hollowness of her own words and the way in which they struck her listeners.

  “So demeaning,” Ian said, “even if done in ‘a European style.’” But he was smiling, very nearly grinning, and lifting his glass to drink. He said, “Still, I might do it. I’ve been offered a contract.”

  Denis said, poking his arm, “With a considerable advance?”

  “Do you know about it?”

  “Meika was telling us the other evening, actually. Though I think her facts were askew, as usual; she seems to think you have already signed the contract.”

  “Dear Meika,” Ian said, pained. “No. I have not ‘already’ signed it.”

  There was a brief silence. Sigrid said, “There’s more of this delicious pie; would anyone like another piece? And I should start the coffee—oh, Christ, I forgot. Who would like coffee?” She took their orders but remained seated, her silky hair blowing, as if in tatters, into her face. The wine had visibly heated her skin, had suffused her with a girlish commandeering confidence; she smiled without knowing what she did, as if her perfectly shaped lips lapsed quite naturally, in repose, into a smile. She said, “This is the most beautiful, the most lovely . . . the most special place, to me . . . in all the world.”

  When she left and the men were alone, Ian immediately asked, “And how is Meika? And Nick?”

  Denis laughed in delighted scorn and said, “Christ, that is the subject in Hazelton, isn’t it, Mal? You can’t go into the lavatory, or wait in line at the post office, without somebody coming up and asking. The last I’ve heard, Meika and Nick are subletting an apartment—”

  “Vaughn says they are jointly buying a condominium, actually,” Malcolm said.

  “Really? Buying? Is this the place on Fifty-third Street, up the block from the museum?”

  “He said, I think, some new place, a glass tower he called it, on Fifth Avenue. Within walking distance of the Metropolitan. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of.”

  “I’m sure I heard Fifty-third Street,” Denis said, frowning. “But, hell, what’s the difference, now that Nick has this virtual new career, this ‘esteem of his colleagues’—was that the wording in the paper? Some high-sounding garblegese like that—now that he’s been taken up by the trade as a brilliant criminal lawyer, you can bet he’ll be able to afford anything he wants. He snubbed me, actually, the other day, at the club. Coming off the squash court—”

  “He didn’t snub you, Denis,” Malcolm said. “He didn’t see you.”

  “He saw me, he looked right through me. Don’t tell me.”

  So they talked for some animated minutes of Nick Ottinger and Meika Cassity, and of poor Vaughn Cassity, crushed with hurt and shame, unable to comprehend how, after all these years of devoted husbandhood, of indulging his wife, with the tacit understanding—“I assume,” Denis said, “it was tacit”—that she would never publicly betray him: and, of course, never leave him; he loved her so much. And Ian listened, finding himself, to his surprise, rather keenly interested: as one might dip one’s finger in a sweet syrupy batter, and lick it, and want more. At the same time he was thinking, Who are these people? Why am I connected with them? He had long since given up his search, if it could ever have been called a search, for Glynnis’s phantom lover. It might have been Denis; it might have been Malcolm; it might have been . . . but did it matter? No man would confess to having been a dead woman’s lover, for, after all, the dead are no longer loved.

  Ian said, laughing and stretching his arms in the warm sunshine, “Meika was so sweet to me, actually, you can’t imagine.”

  “Oh yes I can,” Denis said.

  “And so can I,” said Malcolm.

  SIGRID BROUGHT THE men coffee, borne on a red plastic tray that shone blinding with reflected sunlight. It was getting time, Denis said, glancing at his watch, for them to start back; though he assuredly did not want to return to his brother and sister-in-law’s, in Bar Harbor, where he was obliged to stay the night. Nor did Malcolm, who seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly, much want to leave. He was in Bangor to interview a prominent politician for a piece on yet another environmental outrage, and this was, he assured them, the ne plus ultra of outrages, involving a half-dozen states along the Atlantic seaboard, and The New York Times Magazine was sitting on a scoop, perhaps even Pulitzer Prize—quality material; but, dear Christ, how tired he was of raking others’ muck. He said, in a tone of jocular envy, “You were certainly fortunate, Ian, to find this, this place,” gesturing, Ian thought quite tactfully, away from land, out to sea. Out to the very horizon.

  “It’s quite foggy in the mornings, most mornings,” Ian said, by instinct urged to qualify another’s admiration or to disparage his own position—out of a muddled sense, Glynnis had once told him, of humility and charity—“and then of course there are days when it rains all day, and we just stay inside.” He stopped; his face heated; he felt absurd and exposed, very like a newlywed husband. He said, “I’m still editing the Journal, of course. Martha sends me stacks of mail at least once a week.”

  So they were deflected onto the familiar subject of the Journal, about which Ian and Denis could talk for hours, now recounting, for Sigrid and Malcolm’s benefit, a small delicious scandal of the previous winter, when a senior political scientist at the Center in Palo Alto reacted rather unprofessionally to a rejection letter from one of the associate editors and fired off two telegrams—one to Ian McCullough and one to Max Kreizer—and followed these up with a lengthy letter to Denis, whose friend he’d believed he was. “And naturally I was drawn into the fray, good-hearted Grinnell, trying to explain to this ‘distinguished’ academic that the rejection was nothing personal; but nothing professional either—in terms of the high quality of his work, I mean—but that, due to the vagaries of publishing a journal and the timeliness of certain subjects, the editors are forced, now and then, ‘and I do mean forced,’ to reject first-rate material. But now—”

  “Now he is feuding with Denis,” Ian said, laughing, his cheeks flushed. “Now he goes about saying—”

  “—the most libelous, ridiculous things about me,” Denis said. “Impugning, even,
the integrity of my scholarship. As if he knows anything about my scholarship!”

  So Denis and Ian told the story, almost, at times, in concert; and Sigrid laughed, seeming genuinely amused, charmed, Ian supposed, by Denis, who was at his best, his funniest, this afternoon; and Malcolm, though he’d doubtless heard the story before, laughed as well. “We are all so extraordinarily vain,” Malcolm said, with a wide white grin. “I suppose it’s all we have, you know, to keep going.”

  “Oh, surely not ‘all,’” Ian said. For some reason his heart swelled with gratitude; he loved his friends and would have liked to seize their hands, perhaps would have done so, had Sigrid not been present. He thought, Denis and I will never tell that story again. I will never see Denis again.

  And how do you know?

  I just know.

  Yes, but how?

  I will blow my brains out when the season turns.

  They talked about Hazelton acquaintances, colleagues at the Institute, one of the research assistants who had just had a baby—“Great-looking baby,” Denis said, “and it looks nothing like me”—and again Ian thought of Leonard Oppenheim and wondered how he and Paul were managing, but, irresolute about the correct pronunciation of Leonard’s illness—Kaposi’s sarcoma?—did not want to ask. Denis was saying what an extraordinary coincidence it was that both the McCullough and the Grinnell houses would be on the market at the same time, and competing. “Who could have predicted it, a few years ago!”

  Malcolm said, “Christ. We were all so happy.” He paused, and added, as if it might, for Sigrid Hunt’s benefit, be required, “In those houses.”

  Ian began to say, “In all our houses,” but Denis was speaking and cut him off. “Roberta says she will oversee the packing, the moving, all that. She knows my nerves can’t bear it.”

  Malcolm said, “Roberta is a saint.”

  “But she doesn’t ask after my health. She so very conspicuously doesn’t ask after my health,” Denis said.

  “How is your health?” Ian asked. “That trouble with your eyes—”

  Denis made an impatient gesture. “My phantom brain tumor? It’s gone away, I think. I try not to notice.” He laughed and looked at Sigrid, warmly, frankly, as if, being a woman, merely, and not a woman of some physical distinction, she might naturally be sympathetic with his plight. “I have other troubles now, in other regions of the body, but they come and go. I try not to notice.”

  Malcolm asked Ian, “And what about Bianca? How long will she be in Thailand? June seems to think that Glynnis’s book, the cookbook she was working on—”

  “American Appetites,” Denis said. “I love the title.”

  “—is going to be published after all. She said that Bianca was finishing it—”

  “Don’t you love the title?” Denis said, nudging Sigrid’s arm. The wine had made him both aggressive and somnolent; at such times his eyelids drooped as if with secret wisdom. “I love the title. She was such a—an imaginative woman, you can’t imagine. Such a lovely woman.”

  “I know,” Sigrid said quietly. “I knew her.”

  Denis frowned in surprise. “Oh. Of course. That’s right. I’d forgotten you had.”

  Stubbornly, even primly, Sigrid persisted. “She was my friend too. Glynnis.”

  The statement seemed to hover in the air as if unheard.

  Ian said, “But it is going to be published. Bianca finished it the week she left. Glynnis’s publisher, the same publisher, is bringing it out, next January in fact, they’re going to rush it to get books in the stores before Christmas—prepublication copies I mean. For the Christmas trade. Glynnis always did so well, you know,” he said, “around Christmas, in paperback . . . in paperback especially.” They were looking at him, he thought, uneasily. But surely they could not know how suffocatingly hard his heart was beating in his chest. He said, as if to round the subject off and retreat from it, “Bianca did a marvelous job. Typing on the word processor, hours at a time, determined to get it done before she left. And she did.”

  “How long does she plan to be gone?” Malcolm asked. “You know, Thailand is a beautiful country.”

  “It is,” Denis said, nodding vehemently. “And so is Vietnam.”

  “I know, I’ve been there,” Ian said. “I’ve been to both countries. Yes,” he said, trying to keep his concentration, though there was a sharp pain between his eyes, and his voice sounded suddenly distant and tinny, “Thailand is beautiful. Beautiful.”

  “And the people—”

  “Beautiful.”

  Ian could not remember what he was saying, what the question he’d been asked was, and did not want to inquire. He recalled, with pain, how, in those final months at home—though no one had known at the time, of course, that they were Mr. McCullough’s final months at home—his father had frequently repeated himself, asking questions he’d asked an hour before, angered when answers weren’t immediately forthcoming. His brain had been muddled by alcohol and, Ian now saw, so very simply, despair.

  The party had fallen silent. Sigrid drew breath to speak, yet seemed not to know what to say. For Sigrid Hunt had her story too, did she not, her surely fascinating life’s story, up to and beyond the point at which it intersected with the McCulloughs’ tragedy? And it baffled her that none of the men at the table seemed to want to hear—at this juncture in time, at least—no matter how their eyes lingered on her, or trailed after her, or lost themselves in her silky windblown hair.

  But she did not take offense. She was not that sort of girl. She was quick, shrewd, inspired, leaning forward, smiling, scarcely minding that her long loose floppy white sleeves trailed across a stained plate or two, and saying, “This kiwi pie, there’s nearly half of it left; who wants more? Won’t you all have just a little more?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  ALSO BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  With Shuddering Fall (1964)

  A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)

  Expensive People (1968)

  them (1969)

  Wonderland (1971)

  Do with Me What You Will (1973)

  The Assassins (1975)

  Childwold (1976)

  Son of the Morning (1978)

  Unholy Loves (1979)

  Bellefleur (1980)

  Angel of Light (1981)

  A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)

  Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)

  Solstice (1985)

  Marya: A Life (1986)

  You Must Remember This (1987)

  American Appetites (1989)

  Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)

  Black Water (1992)

  Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)

  What I Lived For (1994)

  Zombie (1995)

  We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)

  Man Crazy (1997)

  My Heart Laid Bare (1998)

  Broke Heart Blues (1999)

  Blonde (2000)

  Middle Age: A Romance (2001)

  I’ll Take You There (2002)

  The Tattooed Girl (2003)

  The Falls (2004)

  Missing Mo
m (2005)

  Black Girl / White Girl (2006)

  The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007)

  My Sister, My Love (2008)

  Little Bird of Heaven (2009)

  Mudwoman (2012)

  The Accursed (2013)

  Carthage (2014)

  CREDITS

  Cover design by Steve Attardo

  Cover artwork © by Pierre Mornet

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  AMERICAN APPETITES. Copyright © 1989 by The Ontario Review. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  A hardcover edition of this book was first published in 1986 by Dutton Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA).

  FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2014

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  EPub Edition July 2014 ISBN 9780062269249

  ISBN 978-0-06-226923-2

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