Snake Eyes

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Yet Daddy couldn’t always tell Joel and Kenny apart—he had to admit. If the playful little boys wanted to deceive him there wasn’t much Daddy could do except try to make a game of it, and not be hurt, or angry. Gina, who took it all less seriously, was harder to deceive: she had only to swoop down upon the twins, laughing, clamping a hand down on each boy’s shoulder, crying, “Joel, behave! And Kenny! I know which one of you is which!”

  It must be, Michael thought, gazing at the sleeping boys, that a mother is closer to children than a father. Than even the most loving and concerned of fathers.

  Joel stirred, sighed, his eyelids fluttered but did not open. In a vague groping gesture he jammed a thumb into a corner of his mouth.

  Michael was nearly dressed for the imminent dinner party (at the Trimmers’, was it?—or the Deardons’?), had only to quickly knot a tie around his neck and put on his suit coat, but he seemed to have forgotten the time, so lost in contemplation of his sons. It was uncanny how closely they resembled each other. Why did it make him uneasy? If it did not disturb them, why should it disturb Daddy? Michael tried to see an advantage of twinness: one was, at least, not one in the world, in a very literal as in a more poetic sense, but two. One’s being was doubled in the world. Thus, one could not be so readily erased.

  (Twins! When Michael related to his sister, Janet, their mother’s odd reaction to the twins—both to the announcement that Gina was expecting twins and to their actual birth: Mrs. O’Meara had not flown up to see them until they were four months old—Janet had said, hesitating, “Yes, there’s some mystery about our childhood, or about Mother and Father, but you can’t ask her about it, you can’t even approach asking, I’ve tried.” Michael had been astonished at this casual revelation, but skeptical. He’d laughed and said, “Mystery? Are you serious? Us?”)

  He was thinking, for no reason he could have named, of Kierkegaard; of Kierkegaard’s classic essay Fear and Trembling which he’d read twenty years ago. The story of the biblical Abraham and his twin sons. A nightmare parable out of Genesis, when we, the human species, were so newly and precariously human, we might be asked to sacrifice our own children to ravenous Yahweh the Volcano God.

  Abraham had journeyed to Mount Moriah, commanded by God to sacrifice his twin sons, not knowing until his arrival that this was a test of his faith and that a sacrificial ram would be provided—fortunately! Abraham the patriarch and his beloved son Isaac and—. What was the other son’s name? Try as he could, Michael could not remember.

  Michael did remember, distinctly, reading the Kierkegaard essay in a single ecstatic sitting in the library of the seminary, and being powerfully moved. Ah, yes! Kierkegaard had written passionately of the “infinite resignation” that must precede true religious faith: the leap of the Absurd: the leap over the abyss.

  At the age of twenty-two, Michael O’Meara had opened his heart boldly to such notions. To some extent, he had believed. But he had not been ravished by religious certitude. At the core, he remained the same person, unmistakably.

  Though who that person was—he didn’t quite know.

  Wryly Michael thought, You can leap with all good faith and yet fall into the abyss.

  Surely, in human history, that was happening with ever greater frequency?

  “Michael—?”

  Gina had come up behind him to lay a tentative hand on his shoulder.

  Michael woke from his reverie to see Gina, in high heels and a dress of some pale silky material new to him, leaning over him with a vexed expression. A cool sweet scent as of narcissus wafted about her.

  She led him out into the hall, whispering, “I’ve been looking for you, it’s late.”

  At the door, Michael cast a final yearning glance at his sons. They slept as before, undisturbed. Joel in his bed, Kenny in his. Michael felt again that pang of exquisite helpless love.

  He slipped an arm around Gina’s stiffened body. “I’m sorry, honey!—I was waiting for them to fall asleep, and I must have lost track of the time.”

  Gina was regarding him with thoughtful eyes. “Yes. It seems to happen so often.”

  “Don’t bring up the subject of this—ex-convict protégé of yours tonight. Please.”

  “I wasn’t intending to.”

  “Word will get out quickly enough in Mount Orion.”

  “Gina, honey, don’t you think you’re exaggerating this?”

  They were on their way to the Trimmers’ and were already twenty minutes late. Michael was driving the newer of their cars, a sleek white Mazda with a sun roof, and Gina, beside him in the passenger’s seat, cast him one of her fierce sidelong looks. “Don’t you think you are?” she asked.

  Ironically, as soon as Michael and Gina entered the Trimmers’ vast living room, escorted by Mrs. Trimmer, Clyde Somerset, one of the guests, called out in his booming voice, “Michael! Hey! Isn’t it great, how this Lee Roy Sears”—the name sounded distinct on his tongue, as if it were a foreign expression—“is coming here?”

  Michael glanced at Gina, who, after the smallest fraction of a moment’s hesitation, smiled happily at Clyde Somerset.

  Naturally everyone within earshot was curious to know who Lee Roy Sears was, and what was his connection with Michael O’Meara and Clyde Somerset and the Dumont Center: so the story came out piecemeal, much abbreviated, in Clyde’s grandiloquent telling. Lee Roy Sears emerged as an unjustly imprisoned young man of American Indian extraction who had been saved from the electric chair, by the actions of Michael O’Meara and a few other vigilant citizens; he was a Vietnam veteran suffering from “post-traumatic stress” and the after-effects of Agent Orange; most importantly, from Clyde’s perspective as director of the Dumont Center, he was a gifted artist, a bold, iconoclastic sculptor, whose proposal of an art-therapy program for “physically wounded” Vietnam veterans like himself was already drawing a considerable amount of attention.

  Clyde Somerset was a stout, ruddy-faced, bluntly handsome man in his mid-fifties, the kindest of men, a civic leader and booster, and he and his wife, Susanne, had been very friendly toward the O’Mearas, yet, hearing the self-congratulatory tone of his words, Michael felt his face burn with embarrassment. What would Lee Roy Sears think, if he heard! The worst of it was, Clyde directed his remarks at Michael, as if the two men were having a public dialogue. “Of course it’s risky,” Clyde said ebulliently, “taking on a man like this, with his background. It’s experimental in every sense of the word. But the Dumont Center has been overly conservative in its programs, and, as I told the trustees the other day, now is the chance for us to do something radically different.” He raised his glass in a salute. “Thank you, Michael O’Meara.”

  For most of the half-hour preceding dinner, Michael was plied with questions about Lee Roy Sears. Gina, drink in hand, observed without interrupting. If she was upset in the slightest, she gave no sign: she was far too socially poised, and too vain. And, indeed, she was seeing again, hardly for the first time, how, in public, her husband was an attractive figure: guileless, transparent in his idealism, an overgrown boy with shining eyes and a flushed, sunburnt face. His laughter was immediate and generous; his smile was a smile to win votes. (In fact, Michael had recently been elected to the Mount Orion Township Council, and Gina gaily fantasized him soon running for mayor, then for a seat in the House, why not the Senate?) Now he was, at the relatively young age of forty, chief legal counsel for Pearce Pharmaceuticals, Inc., with a considerable staff at his disposal, and a considerable yearly income; his formerly irritating modesty had acquired a glamorous tone: Michael O’Meara was a man to whom Gina might have been irresistibly drawn, had she not already been his wife, thus immune to his charm.

  Susanne Somerset murmured in Gina’s ear, “Your husband is so sweet, Gina! Clyde and I are both so fond of him.”

  Gina smiled, somewhat mollified. She murmured in reply, “Why, thank you!”

  It wasn’t so far-fetched, Michael’s running for mayor of Mount Orion. Just the other day Dwi
ght Schatten, one of the local Democrats, had made just that suggestion to Gina, at the conclusion of a romantic luncheon at the Far Hills Inn.

  Once everyone was seated at dinner, and other more scattered conversational topics were taken up, Michael was able to relax; to sip his wine, which was a very good red wine; to allow his eye to move restlessly over the gathering. It was a long, elaborately laid table, for Pamela and Jack Trimmer were very well-to-do and took entertaining seriously, as Gina did. (Nothing made Gina so happy as receiving invitations from socially important people—unless it was sending out invitations to socially important people.) Fourteen men and women were seated at the table, all of them friends of the O’Mearas’, or, in any case, friendly acquaintances. (With the painful exception of Marvin Bruns, a prominent real estate speculator, whom Michael frankly disliked, and who he knew disliked him.) They basked in the glow of one another’s regard and respect as around a common fire, and their faces were warmly illuminated by this fire, animated with pleasure. How happy Michael O’Meara felt among them, how blessed, as if one of them!

  Yet he felt a tinge of guilt too. Poor Gina!—maybe he had not been altogether truthful with her, about his recent efforts regarding Lee Roy Sears. Yet he knew he’d done the right thing, and he did not regret it.

  (It was true, as Gina thought, that since the birth of the twins, Michael had been relatively inactive in The Coalition. There simply wasn’t time. He gave money, he signed petitions, that was about all. He’d even forgotten about Sears, as, after the first flush of triumph, we are likely to forget the reasons for our having cared so much about winning. And then Sears had written, a brief, crude little note, thanking him for what he’d said at the hearing. And Michael had written back—very briefly too. And, after a year or so, Sears had written again, another note, simple yet enigmatic: This is just to say how your words lodged in my heart & undeserving as Lee Roy Sears is he hopes one day to SHAKE YOUR HAND IN BROTHERLY LOVE. In all, there had been seven letters, over eight years. Michael had saved them all, hidden away in a file in his desk at home.)

  There sat Gina, chastely beautiful by candlelight, clusters of tiny pearls gleaming in her ears, her nails pinkly polished. She loved such occasions, she was most herself at such times: caught up, as now, in a spirited exchange with Jack Trimmer and Clyde Somerset, with Marvin Bruns looking on. Was Gina aware, Michael wondered, of how intensely Bruns stared at her?—as, it occurred to Michael suddenly, the man so often did. (Last Sunday at the Rathskills’ brunch. The week before, at a cocktail reception at the Dumont Center.) Michael was not a jealous husband, but it abraded his nerves to see another man so regard his wife: that look of sly admiration, or more than admiration, held in check by Bruns’s sardonic curl of a smile. Bruns was dark, sleek-headed as a seal, with sallow yet flushed skin, playful derisive eyes. He was always expensively dressed. He carried himself with a certain pride. And that maddening little smile!—he’d flashed it at Michael like a taunt a few weeks ago, when, after a turbulent meeting of the Mount Orion Township Council, Michael had privately accused him of having manipulated votes in order to break a zoning regulation, to the advantage of Bruns and his real estate partners. Bruns had denied it at first; then, suddenly, with that smile, he’d laughed in Michael O’Meara’s face and said, “So?—this isn’t the Boy Scouts, pal.”

  Subsequently, when the men encountered each other, they were civil—barely. No one knew of their animosity. Michael had decided not to tell Gina because he knew it might upset her, or, worse yet, fail to upset her, much.

  Michael ate his superbly prepared rack of lamb and sipped his tart red wine, and talked, and laughed, and enjoyed himself as he always did at such times, yet he was thinking of how the only really abiding focus of his life was his love for Gina and their sons, beside which everything else—his work for Pearce Pharmaceuticals, his professional “identity”—paled, vanished. So long as he had them, he had everything.

  Yet, disturbingly, he did not truly know the degree to which his family loved him. In fact, whether they loved him at all.

  Did Daddy even know with absolute certainty whether Joel was Joel, or Kenny Kenny!

  His attachment to Gina was passionate, erotic—never, before meeting and falling in love with her, had Michael O’Meara had such powerful feelings. He knew he could never have them again. Yet, should the circumstances of their life together shift, Gina would divorce him and take away their sons—it would be “painful” for her, it would be “devastating,” it would be “tragic,” and yet—.

  As for Joel and Kenny, who loved Daddy, well, he, Michael (was his name Michael?), had been a son too, once. So he well knew how such filial bonds, seemingly so deep, so permanent, forged in love, can be ruptured, overcome. And good riddance.

  Guilt. Why the hell did he feel guilty? He’d bet that Marvin Bruns, who was duplicitous if not openly dishonest, unethical if not overtly criminal, and who was known to have been unfaithful to his wife (an attractive, aging woman from whom he was now separated), had never felt an instant’s pang of guilt. The bastard.

  Now Bruns was talking with Gina, and Gina was laughing, that high cool delicious laughter that sounded always just slightly mocking. Whatever they were talking of, Michael couldn’t hear.

  Michael was himself engaged in a lively conversation at his end of the table. Pamela Trimmer had asked him about Pearce Pharmaceuticals, in which the Trimmers had stock—evidently sales were up an astounding 30 percent in the past year? Michael laughed wryly, and said yes, but lawsuits were up too. “But that’s good, isn’t it, Michael, for you?” Susanne Somerset asked. Michael said, “I don’t think my bosses would see it that way.” This led to a discussion of neurophysiological medicine, in which Pearce, Inc., was one of the world’s leading researchers, having isolated some of the brain’s most subtle biochemicals in order to duplicate them or to produce drugs to bind with them in the brain. Since the basis of neurophysiological activity was chemical, only chemicals could restore the ailing brain to normalcy: there were ingenious new drugs to block anxiety, and drugs to block depression, and drugs to block obsessive-compulsive behavior. “Of course,” Michael said wryly, noticing how everyone at the table was listening, “there are problems, sometimes.”

  This in turn led to a discussion, for some minutes quite heated, about medical technology, malpractice suits, the ethics of “interfering” with human lives; the role of such companies as Pearce, Inc., in helping patients, or exploiting patients, or, from a certain objective perspective, both helping and exploiting them at the same time. Jack Trimmer announced that he would never take any drug so powerful it would control his very brain, and Valeria Darrell, a divorcée in her mid-forties, rather heavily made-up this evening and a bit drunk, interrupted to say that she would, and in fact had—“Nobody dares say a word against these drugs who hasn’t suffered from depression. I know what I’m talking about.” There was a moment’s silence, since no one cared to refute Valeria, still less did they want to provoke her into further disclosures (which, in any case, everyone had heard before); then Clyde Somerset asked, in a mock-scandalized way, how they could all let Michael say, deadpan, that the basis of neurophysiological behavior was only chemical, and this led to Michael’s mild defense of his remark—he was paraphrasing Pearce, Inc., not speaking for himself, his own belief was that human beings were far more than merely biochemical mechanisms. Then Tracey Deardon, who was very fond of Michael O’Meara, and often asked him such questions at such times, called down the table to ask about obsessive-compulsives—she was sure, she said, she was one. As everyone laughed, Michael paused, feeling a bit uncomfortable, for wasn’t it wrong to be amused by others’ pathologies; wasn’t there something morbid, both voyeuristic and masochistic, in taking an interest in medical case histories? Yet, made garrulous by wine, seeing too how Gina was smiling in his direction, Michael could not resist telling his friends of a case study he’d read the other day, an otherwise normal man—“most obsessive-compulsives are presented as ‘ot
herwise normal’”—who had to repeat everything he said, first in a normal voice and then in a lowered voice. There was another otherwise normal man who sorted out things in sevens; another who could never look anyone in the eye; a woman who had to brush her teeth a dozen times a day and had destroyed her gums. There was a woman who’d plucked out most of her hair, including her eyelashes and eyebrows. There was a man under a compulsion to examine every room he entered for “spiders and filth.” One man was under a compulsion to touch his genitals repeatedly, another could never bring himself to touch his. There were eating compulsions, which sometimes resulted in death. There were compulsions governing sleep, and compulsions involving violence. In fact, Michael said, virtually any compulsion you can imagine, no matter how grotesque, someone has made the center of his or her life—“It’s like God, gone wrong.”

  Michael paused, as if he’d said something wicked, but no one noticed, for now came a flood of anecdotes, mostly of a light, comical nature, centering upon his friends’ personal obsessions. Though Michael smiled and laughed with the others, his face had grown very warm; and, in truth, he was ashamed. He’d been instructing his sons in the importance of never laughing at others’ weaknesses, still less at their afflictions, and here Daddy was doing it, himself.