Snake Eyes

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Clyde had mimicked Sears’s speech, fairly accurately, and Freedman laughed again. Michael said, “Well, Clyde, it is censorship, isn’t it?”

  Clyde continued, with a droll face, “Then I spoke with Bishop, quite reasonably I thought, for, after all, the exhibit has to be selective; it can’t contain any more then x pieces by each artist. And Bishop too challenged me, asking if I wanted to ‘stifle his creativity.’ My God! I tried to explain that the Center is partly funded by the New Jersey Art Council, as well as by our endowment and by private donors, and we can’t afford to, in fact we don’t want to, offend the community. There are Asians in Mount Orion, in fact there are several Japanese-Americans who are donors, and they’re here tonight—very fine people, and very generous. We can’t hang art that depicts Vietnamese as freaks, I told Bishop, and d’you know what he said, ‘That’s what the gooks look like, Mr. Somerset. I was there.’”

  Freedman laughed explosively, for it was funny; Michael winced, and said, “Clyde, the exhibit itself is premature. This entire event tonight—I thought from the first it would be premature.”

  “But it’s for fund-raising purposes,” Clyde said vaguely, as if that were an answer. He was wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, he’d been laughing so hard at his own tale. “Also, the CBS coverage—it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  Freedman said dogmatically, “Your program is very well-intentioned, and I’m sure it has already had some beneficial effect upon the veterans. I don’t at all mind my tax money used for such purposes. But, you must know, the very term ‘art therapy’ is oxymoronic: while real art may be ‘therapeutic,’ that aspect of it is incidental, or accidental; therapy, however, can never be ‘art.’ Because therapy by its very nature is pragmatic and for a purpose, and art transcends mere purpose. It simply is.”

  Freedman spoke glibly, as if concluding a lecture. Michael asked, his voice edged with anger, “How can you be so sure?—who is to judge?”

  Freedman laughed, saying, as if playfully, “Why, we are to judge.”

  “And who the hell is ‘we’?”

  Michael O’Meara’s tone was so uncharacteristically adversarial, his friend Clyde stared at him blankly; and Freedman, smile fading, drew back just perceptibly. Elsewhere, near the bar, laughter erupted; it was nearing the time when the first guests would begin to leave. Michael understood that he was exaggerating the situation, making a fool of himself, and for what reason?—he scarcely knew. Later that evening Clyde would remark to Susanne that Michael O’Meara must be under some strain. By the end of the week it would be all through Mount Orion.

  Michael said quickly, as if relenting, “I suppose I want Lee Roy Sears to be a real artist, since I can’t be one myself.”

  It was the first time such a thought had entered his mind. But now he’d uttered it, and Clyde Somerset and his friend Freedman seemed to accept it, it sounded just right.

  There, seen at an angle, reflected lewdly in a vertical panel of gleaming aluminum, the couple was embracing surreptitiously, in a doorway on the far side of the mezzanine. So unexpected and shocking a sight, above the crowded lobby, that Michael O’Meara, just leaving the men’s room on the mezzanine, froze where he stood, and stared.

  A blond woman in a purple dress that fitted her slender figure snugly. A man, just her height, black-haired, in an orange plaid coat. They were standing very close—intimately close.

  Reckless in their behavior, no doubt a bit drunk, confident that no one would see them, up on the mezzanine.

  Who were they?—kissing, mauling each other, the man squeezing the woman’s breast?—and she laid her hand against his chest to push him away, and he responded at once with a low laugh gripping her buttocks in the expensive purple fabric tightly, yes and rudely, no gentlemanly nonsense about him, pressing her against him groin to groin.

  The two of them swaying together as in a lewd clumsy dance.

  And that peal of high tinkling laughter like shattering glass.

  Like a woman in sudden, unexpected orgasm.

  Yet, when Michael O’Meara unthinkingly turned, it was only to see his wife, Gina, and his friend Lee Roy Sears talking together, not in a doorway, but at the top of the stairs; Gina stood on the landing, and Lee Roy Sears, a curious abashed-defiant look on his face, a step or two below. They were not touching. They were chastely apart and gave no evidence of having been touching, let alone embracing as Michael had seen, or had thought he’d seen.

  Michael blinked, shook his head, as a dog might shake its head, to clear it in some comically literal way. What had he seen?—only Gina talking with Lee Roy Sears, as they quite frequently talked, in Michael’s presence.

  He looked back at the aluminum panel—but there too, in its gleaming, just slightly distorting surface, the blond, purple-clad figure and the man’s figure, in pumpkin-orange plaid, were not touching—one could see inches of space between them.

  Later, Michael O’Meara would tell himself, as a doctor might tell a worried patient, or, indeed, as Michael O’Meara himself, in an avuncular tone, might counsel one or another of the junior legal staff at Pearce who sometimes came to him with their problems—Too much to drink, on a nearly empty stomach. Too much excitement. The pressures of the job. The pressures of the life.

  A moment later, Sears had turned to descend the stairs, limping briskly along; and Gina, seeing Michael, who was now approaching her quite openly as if nothing were wrong (nothing was wrong—obviously), called out to him in the voice of a hurt, angry little girl, with such vehemence Michael’s first thought was that he must be to blame, “Oh Michael, you won’t believe this: Lee Roy isn’t going to have dinner with us after all! After he’d said he would! Valeria Darrell has talked him into driving into Manhattan with her, so that, as she says, she can introduce him to ‘powerful contacts’ in the art world! The bitch!”

  Unavoidably, Lee Roy Sears’s absence from the O’Mearas’ household that evening, the more emphasized by Janet O’Meara’s zestful presence, was the primary theme: which Gina, in that way she had of sometimes spoiling occasions for herself, thus for others, refused to let go. Had Lee Roy betrayed his friends, his only true friends in Mount Orion?—or had he been abducted, by that man-hungry ridiculous woman?

  Michael was embarrassed that Gina should speak so hotly, in Janet’s presence, complaining of Valeria Darrell—“And I’d thought that woman was a friend of mine!—of ours!”

  As if innocently, yet with her interviewer’s instinct for the provoking query, Janet asked Gina about Valeria: what was her background, how long had she been divorced, was she a woman likely to have reckless love affairs, was she truly interested in art?—which led poor Gina to utter remarks that, Michael was sure, she would not have uttered, nor perhaps even thought, otherwise.

  For, so far as Michael knew, Gina had always liked Valeria Darrell, who, though older than Gina by some years, was nonetheless one of the most vivacious and attractive women in their circle. She had sympathized with Valeria’s predicament as a woman of no particular talent or abilities save an assured social manner, living in a large, expensive house in Mount Orion, New Jersey, as if waiting—ah, so many American women are waiting, married or single!—for something to happen.

  Calmly, laying a hand over Gina’s as if to restrain her, Michael said, “Gina, please be reasonable. It’s only natural, now Lee Roy is settled more into his life, he should start to make friends of his own and not always be associated with us.”

  “Yes, but Lee Roy is associated with us,” Gina said, withdrawing her hand like a spiteful child. “He wouldn’t be at the Dumont Center, the object of so much attention, if it hadn’t been for Michael O’Meara.” She paused, frowning: two quite distinct lines showed in the smooth skin between her brows. “He wouldn’t be walking on this earth if it hadn’t been for Michael O’Meara. He’d be dead. Electrocuted.”

  “But, Gina—”

  “He wouldn’t have any underwear and socks, a decent shirt, decent shoes, if it hadn’
t been for me!”

  Janet, nodding gravely, as if sympathetically, nonetheless could not resist, “Lee Roy Sears did strike me, when I interviewed him, and still more when I was just watching him, as a fundamentally unknowable person. An enigma. Someone you might imagine you know, perhaps even mistake as a little simple, but, in reality, as you one day discover—you don’t know him at all.” She paused, shivering. By candlelight, Janet’s fair, open, moon-shaped face, with its hint of fleshiness beneath the chin, looked youthful, guileless. “The Ted Bundy type, y’know?—though not quite so attractive as Bundy.”

  Gina stared at Janet blankly. “Ted Bundy? The mass murderer?”

  “Serial murderer, to be precise. Bundy was electrocuted by the State of Florida for having killed as many as thirty girls and women. He wasn’t psychotic. He just wanted to kill. People who knew him claimed he was a ‘nice guy.’”

  Gina looked at Janet as if trying to gauge whether her sister-in-law, whom she did not know well, but had always liked, was being deliberately provoking; or whether, in her rawboned, headlong way, she hadn’t any clear sense of what she said and how it might be interpreted. Gina laughed, though annoyed, saying, “Janet, that’s ridiculous. Michael and I do know Lee Roy, really! He’s sweet, he’s naive, he’s impressionable. He’ll be putty in Valeria Darrell’s hands.”

  It was late, past ten-thirty. They were sitting at the dining room table, Gina and Michael and Janet, languidly finishing a second bottle of wine. The twins had been put to bed hours ago and the house was quiet—unnervingly quiet, to Michael’s ear. (Or did he hear his sons, far away upstairs?—laughing together, moving about when they were supposed to be asleep? Of late, they’d been behaving unpredictably.) After the reception at the Dumont Center, Janet had helped Gina serve a belated dinner, and a sad dinner it turned out to be, though Gina had intended something very different. No one had seemed to have much appetite, despite the delicious gourmet food (from a Mount Orion caterer); Gina in particular had only picked at it, in that fastidious, disdainful, self-punishing way of hers, which worried Michael. She did drink, however: several glasses of red wine.

  Gina and Janet continued to speak, not quite quarreling, of Lee Roy Sears. Michael smiled, watching Gina. Should she turn suddenly to him, in appeal, he was smiling.

  Had Michael O’Meara seen anything in that aluminum panel on the mezzanine of the Dumont Center?—he had not.

  Or, having glimpsed something, he would soon forget; had in fact already forgotten what he’d seen—that is, what he had not seen.

  “Would you pour us a little more wine, Michael?” Gina asked, pursing her lips, “or is that bottle empty?”

  “It’s almost empty.”

  “Then—would you open another? Please?”

  “Another? Now?”

  Gina lifted both her and Janet’s glasses, in a gay drunken gesture, as if offering twin toasts.

  “Another, darling. Now.”

  “I don’t think I should, Gina. We’ve all had enough.”

  “‘Enough’? What is ’enough’? Who is to say, what is ‘enough’?”

  Gina faced Michael boldly. She was in a state in which emotion coursed through her like electricity. Her hair was disheveled, the pupils of her eyes very black. She was still wearing the purple silk dress, but she’d kicked off her shoes and had drawn one leg up beside her, awkwardly, yet in her own way rather gracefully, on her chair. Michael smiled at her, smiled hard. He’d been drinking intermittently for hours but he wasn’t drunk, alcohol had very little effect upon him, but he was tired, and distracted, and not in a mood to get into a quarrel with Gina, especially with his sister so pointedly a witness.

  Janet said, rousing herself, “Oh, Gina, thanks, but I really don’t want any more. I—”

  “Yes, but I do,” Gina said. “Michael, go get another bottle, will you?—will you? Since Lee Roy isn’t with us, we’ll celebrate in his absence.”

  There was a moment’s pause, a moment’s distinct silence, then Michael rose from the table, and went into the kitchen, to fetch a fresh bottle of wine. He uncorked it in the kitchen, rather clumsily, partly crumbling the cork, spilling wine on the counter. He knew he wasn’t drunk but his fingers were oddly numb, distant from the thoughts that directed them. Skillful editing is required. If he’s born too soon he won’t last. He hadn’t been able to force himself to eat much though he was hungry, in this wayward, undefined mood, in which faint nausea contended with a powerful erotic yearning he could not comprehend.

  When, bearing the wine bottle like a prize, he returned to the dining room, it seemed to him that Gina and Janet, speaking earnestly together, lowered their voices at his approach. The candle flames flickered.

  “Thank you, Michael darling! Aren’t you a darling!” Gina cried.

  Michael poured wine, in three glasses.

  (Hearing, or imagining he heard—what? Someone approaching the house, along the driveway? Footsteps overhead?)

  Whatever the women had been speaking of in Michael’s absence was adroitly dropped. Gina asked Janet about her television work, and Janet, taking the cue, spoke animatedly, and at length, with an underlying air of mild complaint. She was after all a woman of thirty-five, unmarried, childless. Her career was her life, but what was her career? Michael was concerned for her, living alone as she did in New York, yet he knew that, should he speak along such lines, he would be rebuffed at once; should he ask if she was “seeing anyone,” Janet might flush in indignation at the question, as an invasion of her privacy.

  Once, years ago, when Janet was newly out of college, Michael, her well-intentioned older brother, had asked casually if she was “seeing anyone,” and Janet had replied tartly, “If you mean am I sleeping with anyone—no, no I’m not, at the moment. Okay?”

  Okay.

  Janet went on to speak of family now, cousins of hers and Michael’s whom neither had seen in years, and then Janet was speaking, more urgently, of their mother, whom Michael telephoned every two or three weeks, with an adult son’s cheery-dutiful obligation. Janet said, stubborn as always when she took up this subject, “There is a mystery of some kind in Mother’s life, I’m sure of it. But—” Her voice trailed off, vague, irresolute.

  Michael merely shrugged. It was an old topic, and he had no thoughts on the subject.

  Gina said, with an air of excitement, “Oh, yes, I’ve always thought so too, Janet. The way she looks at me sometimes—so sort of pitying, tragic. The way she looks at Michael, and at the boys.” She paused, nodding. “The boys, especially.”

  “But she doesn’t talk to you, I suppose?—confide in you?”

  “Me?—her daughter-in-law? Certainly not,” Gina said. “Why would she? After all these years I don’t dare call her anything other than ‘Mrs. O’Meara.’ Imagine calling her ‘Mother’!”

  “Well,” Janet said, giggling, suddenly tearful, wiping at her nose, “I thought just possibly, since Mother never talks to me, she might talk to you.”

  Gina leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Did she talk to your father, ever? Did he talk to her?”

  Michael listened, or half-listened, bemused, restless. Was he insensitive?—typically and crudely male? For the life of him, he was puzzled by such conversations, which women seem to seek out, as if family relations were so very crucial. Why, for instance, did Gina and Janet care so much about the elder Mrs. O’Meara?—did they care, really? Or was such maudlin talk, exacerbated by the wine, the lateness of the hour, the absence of Lee Roy Sears, simply the sort of talk women of a certain class, education, and background drift into out of an unexamined notion that, yes, one’s mother is important, no matter her insignificance in the larger world; and the most banal deficiencies in her character might be transposed into mystery.

  Gina said sharply, “Michael, why are you laughing?—what’s funny?”

  Michael said, “I’m not laughing.”

  But he guessed he’d been grinning. The lower part of his face ached with strain.

 
Janet said defensively, “Oh, it’s an old story. Michael is convinced that I exaggerate, about Mother. About our parents. He thinks I’m imagining—whatever it is.”

  Michael said, meaning to be kind, “Janet, I think you love Mother very much and are wondering how to make her happy; or less unhappy. When you can’t seem to succeed, any more than I have, you attribute it to a specific cause. Whereas I—”

  “Oh, hell, you’re a lawyer!” Janet said, laughing.

  “—tend to interpret it as a matter of character, of heredity, genes—”

  “—a lawyer for a pharmaceutical company!”

  Janet laughed, and, as if she’d uttered something witty and not, to Michael’s way of thinking, something simply fatuous, Gina burst into laughter too. High tinkling glittery laughter. Michael, blushing, looked from one woman to the other, perplexed.

  Janet sobered, and said, “Oh, God. I’m just remembering. Mother once took me aside, I can’t think why, and said, ‘Having babies—you think it’s the solution to the riddle of what to do with your life, when you’re a young woman. Then, once the babies are born, you see that the riddle has only begun.’”

  Gina gave a little shriek and nearly upset her glass of wine. “Oh, God!—she told me that too! When Joel and Kenny were born!”

  Michael sighed, knowing that Gina and Janet would pursue this subject for many minutes. He had known that his mother had told Gina that cryptic aphorism, but he’d long since forgotten and could not think why it had any particular significance, now.

  No more significance than his father’s cryptic aphorism: What are people for, except to let you down.

  Michael was stacking plates at the table when he happened to catch a glimpse of a face floating in the doorway between the dining room and the darkened hall beyond—it was small, ghostly pale, indistinct in the shadows. He stared past Gina’s shoulder, and the expression on his face must have frightened her, for she turned, quickly, to see what it was, just as the face vanished into the darkness. “Michael, what is it?” Gina asked.