I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Tonight Steven is sitting in the family room adjacent to the kitchen with four-year-old Caitlin in the curve of his arm, listening to his daughter read aloud from one of her new, beautifully illustrated story-books, a tale of imperiled but magically empowered talking animals, and he tries not to be distracted by Holly in the kitchen. He loves these reading sessions with Caitlin with a fierce, fatherly sense of privilege; he remembers with what stunning swiftness Brandon’s early childhood passed, how abruptly his son became a boy, no longer a little boy, whose measure of self-worth is drawn from his boy-classmates and not from his adoring parents.

  Steven resents this caller who interrupts Holly in the kitchen though she has asked him not to call her at that time; she loves cooking for her little family, as she calls the four of them; every evening for Holly means a serious, not elaborate but conscientious dinner, seafood, fish, omelettes, fresh vegetables, whole grain rice, thick spiced soups, her reward, she says, for a day of purely mental work performed for the benefit of strangers. But dinner will be delayed on those evenings when the call comes. The children will become hungry, impatient; Steven will have a second drink; when finally they sit down to eat he’ll see his pretty wife’s melancholy eyes, the downward cast of her smile, and feel rage in his heart for the person responsible.

  By his watch, nearly thirty minutes have gone by.

  As Steven enters the kitchen, Holly is just hanging up the phone. He sees her wiping guiltily at her eyes. “Honey, was that your brother? Again?” Steven tries to keep the exasperation out of his voice: in the little family Daddy is wise, compassionate, mature beyond his thirty-seven years, inclined to settle disputes with a laugh, a well-aimed kiss. Holly is the emotional parent, quick to laughter, tears, effervescence, worry. She says, taking up a spatula and stir-frying vegetables in a large aluminum wok, “Don’t ask, Steven. Please.”

  “Of course I’m going to ask. Owen just called, didn’t he, last Thursday?”

  “Well, he’s having a serious crisis. The anti-depressant his doctor has been prescribing isn’t working out, he’ll have to switch to another drug and he’s anxious, insomniac—” Holly frowns at the simmering vegetables, avoiding Steven’s eyes. “He’s all right, I think. There’s no talk of—you know. He’s just lonely. He says he has no no one to talk with except—” Holly’s voice wavers. She doesn’t want to say no one but me.

  “But why does he have to call at this time? He knows it’s a difficult time. With dinner, the kids—” Steven is trying to speak reasonably. Holly stands silent, and he realizes that his brother-in-law has probably been calling her at other times, too; possibly he calls her at work. But Steven isn’t supposed to know this.

  Holly says apologetically, “Honey, I’ve tried to explain but Owen says, ‘I don’t know the time. It’s a luxury to be conscious of clock-time.’ ”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? That gnomic remark?”

  “He can’t sleep at night, sometimes he sleeps during the day so it’s ‘night for day’ for him, he says. He calls when he gets too lonely and can’t stand another moment of himself. He isn’t like us.”

  “Couldn’t you explain that you’re busy? You’re tired, exhausted? You want to spend some time with your family?”

  “But I’m his family, Owen would say. His only family.” Holly speaks sharply, despairingly. The spatula slips from her fingers, falls clattering to the floor; Steven picks it up. “He says he’s ‘haunted’ by our mother, hears her voice with some of the drugs he takes. I wish you could be more sympathetic, Steven.”

  “Honey, I am. I try. But it’s been years, he’s twenty-nine years old, he seems incapable of growing up. He has no self-respect, no shame, he’s never paid us back that fifteen hundred dollars he borrowed for a down payment on—”

  “Steven, you can’t be throwing that back on him, on me. Not now. When you’re doing so well. We’re doing so well. When we have everything, and Owen has so little.”

  “I do feel sympathy for him, honey.” Steven tries to stroke Holly’s hair and like an offended cat she eases away. “I feel very sorry for him. But I feel sorry for you, too. He’s eating you alive.”

  “What an ugly thing to say,” Holly says, shocked. For a moment the lurid image hovers before them in their cozy, comfortable suburban kitchen: an enormous mouth devouring Holly. She says, tears in her eyes, “You just don’t understand, Steven, how desperate Owen is. He has tried so hard with his art. He has tried to make lasting friends, he’s tried to fall in love. Don’t smile—he has! He’s tried to be—well, normal. But ordinary life is like a maze for some people. It’s biochemical, he’s inherited it from our mother’s side of the family. He was telling me just now he’s terrified of the future. He feels as if he was born with a hole in him, in the region of his heart, he tries to fill, it’s his duty to fill, and nothing will fill it.”

  “Nothing will fill it.” It’s a statement of Steven’s, not a question. Nothing will fill the hole in his brother-in-law’s leaky heart.

  Even if Owen devoured Holly, and Steven, and their children—nothing would fill it.

  But Steven doesn’t say this, it’s an insight he’ll keep to himself. The last thing he wants tonight is to upset Holly further and ruin their family evening. Unlike his predator brother-in-law, he wants Holly to be happy as she deserves.

  And now Caitlin comes bounding into the kitchen, eager to help Mommy. And Daddy has to deflect her with a task, setting the table. It’s a game, but, for Caitlin, a risky one, for if she gets so much as a single fork in the wrong position, she’ll be crushed with a childish mortification that touches Daddy’s heart. No one wants so desperately to be perfect as a four-year-old girl.

  Brandon too enters the kitchen, simulating casualness but glancing worriedly at his parents. “What’re you guys fighting about?” It’s a joke, Brandon is teasing, but beneath his teasing he’s in earnest, anxious to know, so Mommy and Daddy protest in a single voice—“ ‘Fighting’?—nobody’s fighting.”

  THOSE EVENINGS WHEN Owen telephones are the only evenings when Steven and Holly, who have been married twelve years, come dangerously close to disliking each other.

  Owen, all that remains of Holly’s original family. The family that predates the little family.

  Owen, Holly’s younger brother by two years. As a child Owen was so much Holly’s responsibility, in a household in which both parents were alcoholics, that he came to take for granted his sister’s un-critical love, her indulgence, generosity, forgiveness. And blindness to his faults. He has grown into a snakily attractive young-aging man with lavishly blond-streaked hair trimmed up the sides, with a small pigtail at the nape of his neck. Though he’s a clerk at the Green Earth Co-Op and complains of having no money, he wears black silk shirts that hug his narrow torso, stone-washed designer jeans, ostrich-hide boots. (“Gifts from friends,” Owen explains with a droll smile, “—parting gifts.”) He’s shy, and cheeky; he’s self-loathing, and self-absorbed; in profile he’s strikingly handsome, seen head-on, he has a pinched, narrow fox-face with small features, a pouty mouth that breaks into a dazzling smile as if on cue. Owen’s laughter is wild and extravagant. (Brandon has begun to imitate this laughter, unconsciously.) Owen’s tears spill easily. His teeth are small and faintly discolored, the hue of weak tea. He’s frightened of blood: and nearly collapsed once when Brandon, tumbling from his tricycle in the driveway, had a sudden nosebleed. In the final month of Holly’s pregnancy with Caitlin, when Holly was grotesquely, comically swollen, like a boa constrictor who’d swallowed a hog, Owen was hardly able to look at his sister without flinching. “Owen, please understand: pregnancy isn’t a medical pathology,” Holly tried to tease him. When Caitlin was born, he sent flowers but avoided seeing Holly for weeks, on the pretext of illness; in fact, as he confided in Steven, as if man-to-man, he dreaded seeing his sister nursing the infant. “It’s so atavistic. Primal. It must hurt. Ugh!”

  Steven has to concede he’d been charmed by Owen until a few yea
rs ago. In his early twenties Owen had been a serious artist, a figurative painter. That he lived on scholarships, fellowships, art colony grants, and occasional loans from his sister made sense at the time. Owen was young, Owen was “very promising.” If, in time, he came to rely upon these loans—of course, they were gifts—from Holly and her husband, this too made sense. (And he gave them paintings—not always his best paintings, perhaps.) He seemed perhaps bisexual, not exclusively gay; at least, he played at being attracted to the girls Holly introduced him to. If sometimes he stared long and longingly at Steven, Steven took care not to notice.

  Once in their kitchen he overheard Owen say to Holly, “I love Steve. I love him as much as a real brother. Thank you for bringing Steve into my life.”

  Steven was suffused with warmth, tenderness. Though later he would wonder if Owen, who calculated so much, had calculated these words being overheard.

  Though he drives a new-model Toyota (another parting gift from a friend?), Owen lives in a dismal rented apartment. He’s a clerk at an organic foods co-op, a “servile, fawning” job he detests and will probably not keep long. His life appears to be cruising bars, sudden intense friendships, abrupt “misunderstandings” and dismissals. He’d been in and out of AA, rehab clinics. (At Holly’s and Steven’s expense.) Artist-friends have long since vanished. An MFA program at Temple University in Philadelphia “didn’t work out.” Owen lives amid a shifting phantasmagoria of gay acquaintances, friends, lovers. Gary, Oliver, Mark, Kevin. If Steven remembers the name of Owen’s new friend, by the time they speak again and he asks, “How’s Kevin?” he’s likely to meet with a stony silence from Owen, or a blithe, “How should I know, Steve? Ask him.”

  Yet Owen can be warm, charming. Steven tries to remember this. When Brandon was small he played with him for hours, filling in coloring books of his own invention with fantastical acrylic colors. For her third birthday he gave Caitlin a handmade painted book, Frog & Beans, one of Caitlin’s prized possessions. (“Owen should have been a children’s book illustrator,” Steven said, “he has a real talent for this.” Holly said, offended, “Don’t you dare ever tell him that. He’d be wounded.”)

  What Steven fears in Owen is that he has the power of weakness: the power to set Steven and Holly against each other, the power to subtly erode the little family from within. Only recently has Holly confessed to Steven that when they were children in Rutherford, New Jersey, Owen set small fires in their neighborhood and at school. When he was sixteen, he and another boy parked in the boy’s car, ran a hose from the exhaust into the car, and drank themselves unconscious, expecting to die of carbon monoxide poisoning; but they were found in time. And there had been other suicide attempts over the years…“Owen suffered from terrible nightmares as a child,” Holly says. “He’s never been secure. Our mother was sick so much, and sometimes deranged.” Steven listens quietly, not about to say Yes but you aren’t suicidal, why’s that? “Our father died when Owen was eight.” Your father died when you were ten, why not see it from your perspective for once? “ ‘Small mother with claws’—Owen calls her.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ve been telling you. Our mother.”

  “I think the phrase is Kafka’s. ‘Small mother with claws.’ ”

  Holly frowns, annoyed with Steven. “I guess we shouldn’t discuss Owen. It brings out something petty in you.”

  Steven says, stung, “Holly, what’s ‘petty’ to you is crucial to me. I hate it that you aid and abet your brother’s weaknesses. He gets sympathy from you for being pathetic. If you’d encourage him to be strong, independent, to have some masculine pride—”

  Holly bursts into incredulous laughter. “Steven, listen to you. ‘Masculine pride.’ I can’t believe this, you sound like a parody. Owen is prone to illnesses, he is ‘weak’ compared to you. If that makes him less of a man, that’s a pity.”

  Steven says, trying to keep his voice even, “Remember a few years ago, that Christmas we were snowed in, and Owen helped me shovel the driveway? He wasn’t weak then, he surprised us all.” It was true: Steven and Brandon had bundled up to shovel snow after a two-foot snowfall in northern New Jersey, and, after a while, as if reluctantly, Owen had joined them. He shoveled awkwardly at first, then got into the rhythm, cheeks flushed and nose running, joking with Steven and Brandon, quite enjoying himself. As if he’d forgotten himself. Steven had felt an unexpected bond between Owen and himself as the men shoveled the fifty-foot driveway, talking frankly of life, ideals, politics, family. He’d felt that he had established a new, significant rapport with his brother-in-law, of a kind that had made no reference to Holly. I like him. And he likes me. That’s it! But the rapport hadn’t lasted. What was genuine enough in the buoyant cold of a bright, dazzling-white winter day soon dissolved, and not long afterward there was Owen calling Holly to complain of his depression, his insomnia, “faithless” friends, yes and he needed money…

  Holly says, annoyed, “Oh yes: the snow-shoveling. Fine. But my brother is a little more complicated than that, I hope.”

  Steven accepts this in silence. He has brought it on himself, he knows. It’s pointless to argue with Holly about Owen: she loves him in a way impenetrable by Steven, in a way that pre-exists even her love for Brandon and Caitlin. You can call this love morbid, or admirable; a symptom of childhood pathology, or an expression of adult loyalty. But there it is.

  Relenting, as if reading Steven’s thoughts, Holly says gently, “You have to understand, honey: Owen and I were Hansel and Gretel together. Once upon a time.”

  This is meant to dispel tension, as a joke. Steven laughs, and Holly laughs. But is it funny, Steven wonders. It seems to him dangerous, treacherous. To perceive your childhood as mythical, out of a fairy tale.

  THEN, ONE EVENING, when Holly is at the mall with the children, Steven has what will be his final conversation with Owen.

  The phone rings, he answers, and there’s his brother-in-law’s reedy, drawling voice—“Is Holly there? Can I speak with her?”

  “Holly isn’t here, Owen,” Steven says, more amused than annoyed that Owen hasn’t bothered to identify himself, or to waste breath on a greeting to Steven. “What did you want with her?”

  “I—don’t ‘want’ anything. Just to talk to Holly…” Owen’s voice is flat, disappointed.

  “Talk to me.”

  Steven has been watching CNN and now he lowers the sound. He’s in sweatshirt and jeans, drinking beer out of a can. Feeling good. Feeling generous. A productive day in his office in New York City and a warm cozy family evening coming up. He’s possibly wondering if, with Holly out of it, he and Owen can re-establish their old rapport, speak frankly and from the heart. But Owen sounds as if he’s been drinking, or is drugged. He’s vague, not very coherent; lapsing with no preamble into a monologue of complaints—his disappointing job, his botched life, migraine headaches, insomnia—night sweats, fever—“And this new symptom like an elliptic fit that doesn’t quite happen, a really weird sensation like phantom pain in a missing limb—an amputee? Like that?”

  Steven guesses that Owen has meant to say “epileptic.” Steven is distracted by jarringly close-up newsreel footage taken in the Gaza Strip where several rock-throwing young Palestinian boys have been shot by Israeli border guards. He raises the TV volume slightly, not loud enough, he hopes, for Owen to detect. Politely he asks Owen to repeat what he has said; which Owen does, at length. His voice drones on, a litany of physical maladies, psychological woe, despicable “malpractice-worthy” behavior on the part of a formerly trusted doctor. In his self-concern Owen has forgotten that he’s speaking not to Holly but to Steven: he’s alluding to back in Rutherford, back there, remember when, dreamt about last night, O Jesus. The Gaza Strip footage breaks off and an antic SUV ad comes on. Steven laughs.

  There’s a shocked silence. Then Owen says, in a small, hurt voice, “I’m sorry if I’m amusing you, Steve.”

  Steven will recall how easily he spoke, with no premeditation
: “Owen, why be sorry to be amusing? I’d say, from you, that was a good thing.”

  Owen is silent for so long, Steven thinks he must have laid down the phone receiver. Steven has switched to NBC news, there’s an exposé of deplorable conditions in the New Orleans Parish Prison which detains Asian and Haitian immigrants for the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, interviews with visibly scarred, injured men, protestations and denials from prison authorities. Steven listens appalled as Owen resumes his monologue of complaints with renewed fervor, how hurt he’s been, how depressed, the past six months have been hell, his thirtieth birthday is imminent and sometimes he wonders, with so much pain, his paintings rejected that are “every bit as strong” as Lucien Freud’s nudes, Philip Pearlstein’s overrated nudes, and friends letting him down, and the world so vicious, sometimes he wonders whether it’s worth it to keep going. Steven, listening to the testimony of a hospitalized Asian detainee who’d been beaten nearly to death by Caucasian prison guards, says vaguely, “I suppose so, Owen.” Owen says, “What?” Steven says, “Or—maybe it isn’t. It’s your call.” Again there’s shocked silence.

  Then Owen says quietly, “You’re saying, Steve, I should—give up?”

  “From your perspective? Maybe.”

  There. Steven has said it.

  Breathlessly, almost eagerly Owen says, “You think—? In my place—? You’d—”

  “Owen, yes. Frankly, I would.”

  Steven switches back to CNN. The President stepping out of Air Force One somewhere in Europe. Steven’s heart is beating quickly, as after an invigorating sprint. But he’s frightened, too. Uttering words he has only fantasized. Die, why don’t you. You pathetic loser. Put yourself out of your misery. Give us a break.

  Of course, in the next moment Steven regrets what he’s said. He’s been blunt, cruel. Owen must be crushed. Quickly, he says, lowering the TV volume, “Owen? Maybe not. No. I’m sorry I said that.”