I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Beginning at about the age of eleven he’d secretly copied some of the drawings and plates by placing tracing paper over them and using a pencil. Later, he began to draw his own figures without the aid of tracing paper. He would discover that, where fascination gripped him, he was capable of executing surprising likenesses. In school art classes he was singled out for praise. He became most adept at rapid charcoal sketches, executed with half-shut eyes. And later, sculpting busts, figures. His hands moving swiftly, shaping and reshaping clay.

  “My hands just move, I guess. They have their own way of thinking.”

  This emergence of “talent” embarrassed him. To obscure his interest in the human figure in extremis, he learned to make other sorts of sculptures as well. His secret interests were hidden, he believed, inside the other.

  It would turn out, he disliked medical school. The dissecting room had revulsed him, not aroused him. He’d nearly fainted in his first pathology lab. He hated the fanatic competition of medical school, the almost military hegemony of rank. He would quit before he flunked out. Forensic science was as close as he would get to the human body, but here, as he told interviewers, his task was re-assembling, not dissecting.

  THE SKULL WAS nearly completed. Beautifully shaped it seemed to Kyle, like a Grecian bust. The empty eye-sockets and nose-cavity another observer would think ugly, Kyle saw filled in, for the girl had revealed herself to him. The dream had been fleeting yet remained with him, far more vivid in his mind’s eye than anything he’d experienced in his own recent life.

  Was she living, and where?

  His lost daughter. His mind drifted from the skull and onto her, who was purely abstract to him, not even a name.

  He’d seen her only twice, as an infant, and each time briefly. At the time her mother, manipulative, emotionally unstable, hadn’t yet named her; or, if she had, for some reason she hadn’t wanted Kyle to know.

  “She doesn’t need a name just yet. She’s mine.”

  Kyle had been deceived by this woman who’d called herself “Letitia,” an invented name probably, a stripper’s fantasy name, though possibly it was genuine. Letitia had sought out Kyle Cassity at the college where he’d been a highly visible faculty member, thirty-nine years old. Her pretext for coming into his office was to seek advice about a career in psychiatric social work. She’d claimed to be enrolled in the night division of the college which turned out to be untrue. She’d claimed to be a wife estranged from a husband who was “threatening” her which had possibly been true.

  Kyle had been flattered by the young woman’s attention. Her obvious attraction to him. In time, he’d given her money. Always cash, never a check. And he never wrote to her: though she left passionate love notes for him beneath his office door, beneath the windshield of his car, he never reciprocated. As one familiar with the law he knew: never commit yourself in handwriting! As, in more recent years, Kyle Cassity would never send any e-mail message he wouldn’t have wanted to see exposed to all the world.

  He hadn’t fully trusted Letitia but he’d been sexually aroused by her, he liked being in her company. She was a dozen years younger than he, reckless, unreliable. Not pretty, but very sexual, seductive. After she vanished from his life he would suppose, sure, she’d been seeing other men all along, taking money from other men. Yet he accepted the pregnancy as his responsibility. She’d told him the baby would be his, and he hadn’t disbelieved her. He had no wish to dissociate himself from Letitia at this difficult time in her life, though his own children were twelve, nine, five years old. And Vivian loved him, and presumably trusted him, and would have been deeply wounded if she’d known of his affair.

  Though possibly Vivian had known. Known something. There was the evidence of Kyle’s infrequent lovemaking with her, a fumbling in silence.

  But in December 1976 Letitia and the infant girl abruptly left New Jersey. Even before the birth Letitia had been drifting out of her married lover’s life. He’d had to assume that she found another man who meant more to her. He had to assume that his daughter would never have been told who her true father was. Twenty-six years later, if she were still alive, Letitia probably wouldn’t have remembered Kyle Cassity’s name.

  “NOW: TELL US your name, dear.”

  After a week and a day of painstaking work, the skull was complete. All the bone fragments had been used, and Kyle had made synthetic pieces to hold the skull together. Excited now, he made a mold of the skull and on this mold he began to sculpt a face in clay. Rapidly his fingers worked as if remembering. In this phase of the reconstruction he played new CDs to celebrate: several Bach cantatas, Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth Symphonies, Maria Callas as Tosca.

  EARLY IN OCTOBER the victim was identified: her name was Sabrina Jackson, a part-time community college student studying computer technology and working as a cocktail waitress in Easton, Pennsylvania. The young woman had been reported missing by her family in mid-May. At the time of her disappearance she’d been twenty-three, weighed one hundred fifteen pounds, her photographs bore an uncanny resemblance to the sketches Kyle Cassity and his assistant had made. In March she’d broken up with a man with whom she’d been living for several years and she’d told friends she was quitting school and quitting work and “beginning a new life” with a new male friend who had a “major position” at one of the Atlantic City casinos. She’d packed suitcases, shut up her apartment, left a message on her answering service that was teasingly enigmatic.

  Hi there! This is Sabrina. I sure am sorry to be missing your call but I am OUT OF TOWN TILL FURTHER NOTICE. Can’t say when I will be returning calls but I WILL TRY.

  No one had heard from Sabrina Jackson since. No one in Atlantic City recalled having seen her, and nothing had come of detectives questioning casino employees. Nor did anyone in Easton seem to know the identity of the man with whom she’d gone away. Sabrina Jackson had disappeared in similar ways more than once in the past, in the company of men, and so her family and friends had been hesitant at first to report her missing. Always there was the expectation that Sabrina would “turn up.” But the sketches of the Toms River victim bore an unmistakable resemblance to Sabrina Jackson, and the silver earrings found with the remains were identified as hers.

  “ ‘Sabrina.’ ”

  It was a beautiful name. But Sabrina Jackson wasn’t a beautiful young woman.

  Kyle stared at photographs of the missing woman, whose blemished skin was a shock. Nor was her skin pale as he’d imagined but rather dark, and oily. Her eyebrows weren’t delicately arched as he’d drawn them but heavily penciled in, as the outline of her fleshy mouth had been exaggerated by lipstick. Still, there was the narrow forehead, the snubbed nose, the small, receding chin. The shoulder-length hair, wavy, burnished-brown, as Kyle had depicted it. When you looked from the sketches drawn in colored pencil to the actual woman in the photographs, you were tempted to think that one was a younger, sentimentally idealized version of the other; or that the two girls were sisters, one very pretty and feminine and the other somewhat coarse, sensuous.

  “You? Always, it was you.”

  Strange it seemed to him, difficult to realize: the skull he’d reconstructed was the skull of this woman, Sabrina Jackson, and not the skull of the girl he’d sketched. Always, Sabrina Jackson had been the victim. Kyle Cassity was being congratulated for his excellent work but he felt as if a trick had been played on him.

  He contemplated for long minutes the girl in the photographs who smiled, preened, squinted into the camera as if for his benefit. The bravado of not-knowing how we must die: how our most capricious poses outlive us. The heavy makeup on Sabrina Jackson’s blemished face made her look older than twenty-three. She wore cheap tight sexy clothes, tank tops and V-neck blouses, leather miniskirts, leather trousers, high-heeled boots. She was a smoker. She did appear to have a sense of humor, Kyle liked that in her. Mugging for the camera. Pursing her lips in a kiss. The type who wouldn’t ask a man for money directly; but if you offered it,
she certainly wouldn’t turn it down. A small pleased smile would transform her face as if this were the highest of compliments. A murmured Thanks! And the bills quickly wadded and slipped into her pocket and no more need be said of the transaction.

  The skull was gone from Kyle’s laboratory. There would be a private burial of Sabrina Jackson’s remains in Easton, Pennsylvania. Now it was known that the young woman was dead, the investigation into her disappearance would intensify. In time, Kyle didn’t doubt, there would be an arrest.

  Kyle Cassity! Congratulations.

  Amazing, that work you do.

  Good time to retire, eh? Quit while you’re ahead.

  There was no longer mandatory retirement at the college. He would never retire as a sculptor, an artist. And he could continue working indefinitely for the State of New Jersey since he was a free-lance consultant, not an employee subject to the state’s retirement laws. These protests rose in him, he didn’t utter.

  He’d ceased playing the new CDs. His office and his laboratory were very quiet. A pulse beat sullenly in his head. Disappointed! For Sabrina Jackson wasn’t the one he’d sought.

  “I RESENT THIS. You mooning over the dead.”

  Startled, Kyle glanced up from the Newark Star-Ledger he was holding before him. He’d been reading of Sabrina Jackson, new leads in the investigation into her murder. It was a week since he’d shipped back the skull. He’d been staring at the young woman’s jauntily smiling photograph prominent on the first page of the second section of the newspaper. Vivian must have come up behind him, silently.

  Kyle was astonished by the bitterness in his wife’s voice, and by the clumsy violence with which she struck the newspaper, as a child might do. “A man your age! Making a fool of himself over a girl young enough to be your—granddaughter.”

  “Vivian, for God’s sake. I’m only just reading the paper. This is—”

  “I know what it is! Always the dead! You never cared so much for Jacky. You never cared so much for any of us.”

  “Vivian—”

  “No. Don’t touch me. Your clammy hands disgust me.”

  In the years of their marriage Vivian had never spoken to Kyle Cassity like this.

  He couldn’t have been more shocked than if she’d struck him with her fists. She left the room, and her footsteps were heavy and graceless on the stairs. Kyle knew he must follow her, though he dreaded it.

  In the woman’s face he had seen no love for him. No respect.

  Upstairs in their bedroom that smelled of the lavender sachets she kept in the bureau drawers Vivian was crying, but tears glistened like hot acid on her face. When Kyle tried to touch her she pushed away his hands. “Your ‘fetishes’—that’s what they are. Skulls. Bones. Drawings of dead people. Dead women. I’ve seen them, they disgust me.” Another time Kyle was shocked, and deeply embarrassed. Had Vivian been going through the file drawers in his study? He had a collection of explicit anatomical drawings and color plates hidden away, at which he hadn’t glanced in years. Choked with indignation Vivian said, “You never could touch me in the light, could you! Never could make love to me knowing it was me. I knew about your other women. Everybody knew. Our children knew, that’s why they didn’t respect you when they were growing up—that’s why they don’t respect you now. I wasn’t going to give my husband up to those women, I wanted you then. I thought I loved you. But now—”

  There were no words for Kyle to stammer except flat banal unconvincing words in which he couldn’t himself believe. “Vivian, you don’t mean it. What you’re saying—”

  “I’m speaking the truth for once. This last time, the way you’ve been behaving, gone most of the time, prowling the house in the night, rude, selfish, mooning over her, whoever she is, another one of the dead. A man your age!” Vivian spoke with the liquidy passion of Callas, her voice rising to madness. “You disgust me, I’ve decided I don’t want to live with disgust any longer. Not at my age. I deserve better. I’m going to stay with Jacky. I’ve called her, it’s been decided. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” Jacky was their married daughter, now forty years old; she lived with her family in Evanston, Illinois.

  Kyle was having difficulty absorbing what he heard. There was a roaring in his ears. Decided? Something had been decided.

  “Vivian, don’t be ridiculous. You can’t possibly—”

  “I can. I can, and I will. I am.”

  Kyle stood smiling as a man might smile who has been struck a mortal blow. It’s over. She knows my heart. He tried to reason with Vivian but she would not be dissuaded. In her fiery face shone the valor of revenge. When Kyle fumbled to embrace her she pushed him away with an expression of contempt.

  “We’re too old for love. We make ourselves ridiculous.”

  IN THE MORNING when Vivian was preparing to leave, Kyle said good-bye to her quietly and without rancor. He took her limp hand that felt so soft and so vulnerable in his, and he would have closed his arms around her in a clumsy farewell except with a little cry of hurt she stepped aside, her face averted. She was fearful of leaving, Kyle saw. But he would not attempt another time to dissuade her. As she’d seen into his heart so he had seen into hers. Though he knew he wouldn’t be home to take the call, he said, “Call me tonight. Keep in touch.” After forty years he could not bring himself to speak her name another time.

  Before the taxi arrived to take Vivian to Newark Airport, Kyle was gone. He would drive to Easton, Pennsylvania, as he’d been planning irresolutely for days. His heart beat with the avidity of a young lover.

  “OFFICER. COME IN.”

  The face of Sabrina Jackson’s mother was tight as a sausage in its casing. She made an effort to smile like a sick woman trying to be upbeat, but wanting you to know she was trying for your sake. In her dull-eager voice she greeted Kyle Cassity, and she would persist in calling him “Officer” though he’d explained to her that he wasn’t a police officer, only just a private citizen who’d helped with the investigation. He was the man who’d drawn the composite sketch of her daughter that she and other relatives of the missing girl had identified.

  Strictly speaking, of course this wasn’t true. Kyle hadn’t drawn a sketch of Sabrina Jackson but of a fictitious girl. He’d given life to the skull in his keeping, not to Sabrina Jackson of whom he’d never heard. But such metaphysical subtleties would have been lost on the forlorn Mrs. Jackson who was staring at Kyle as if, though he’d just reminded her, she couldn’t recall why he’d come, who exactly he was. A plainclothes officer with the Easton police, or somebody from New Jersey?

  Gently, Kyle reminded her: the drawing of Sabrina? That had appeared on TV, in papers? On the Internet, worldwide?

  “Yes. That was it. That picture.” Mrs. Jackson spoke slowly as if each word were a hurtful pebble in her throat. Her small warm bloodshot eyes, crowded inside the fatty ridges of her face, were fixed upon him with a desperate urgency. “When we saw that picture on the TV…We knew.”

  Kyle murmured an apology. He was being made to feel responsible for something. His oblong shaved head had never felt so exposed and so vulnerable, veins throbbing with heat.

  “Mrs. Jackson, I wish that things could have turned out differently.”

  “She always did the wildest things, more than once I’d given up on her, I’d get so damn pissed with her, but she’d land on her feet, you know?—like a cat. That Sabrina! She’s the only one of the kids counting even her two brothers, made us worry so.” Oddly, Mrs. Jackson was smiling. She was vexed at her daughter, but clearly somewhat proud of her too. “She had a good heart, though, Officer. Sabrina could be the sweetest girl when she made that effort. Like the time, it was Mother’s Day, I was pissed as hell because I knew, I just knew, not a one of them was going to call—”

  Strange and disconcerting it was to Kyle, the mother of the dead girl was so young: no more than forty-five. A bloated-looking little woman with a coarse, ruddy face, in slacks and a floral-print shirt and flip-flops on her pudgy bare feet, hob
bled with a mother’s grief like an extra layer of fat. Technically, she was young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.

  Well! All the world, it seemed, was getting to be young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.

  “I’d love to see photographs of Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson. I’ve just come to pay my respects.”

  “Oh, I’ve got ’em! They’re all ready to be seen. Everybody’s been over here wanting to see them. I mean not just the family, and Sabrina’s friends, you wouldn’t believe all the friends that girl has from just high school alone, but the TV people, newspaper reporters. There’s been more people through here, Officer, in the last ten–twelve days than in all of our life until now.”

  “I’m sorry for that, Mrs. Jackson. I don’t mean to disturb you.”

  “Oh, no! It’s got to be done, I guess.”

  The phone rang several times while Mrs. Jackson was showing Kyle a cascade of snapshots crammed into a family album, but the fleshy little woman, seated on a sofa, made no effort to answer it. Even unmoving on the sofa she was inclined to breathlessness, panting. “Those calls can go onto the answering service. I use that all the time now. See, I don’t know who’s gonna call any more. Used to be, it’d be just somebody I could predict, like out of ten people in the world, or one of those damn solicitors I just hang up on, but now, could be anybody, almost. People call here saying they might know who’s the guilty son of a bitch did that to Sabrina but I tell them call the police, see? Call the police, not me. I’m not the police.”