Snake Eyes

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Gina said angrily, “What about our sons?—do we have to wait until they’re hurt, too?”

  Joel and Kenny continued to deny having seen Lee Roy Sears—“Mr. Sears hasn’t been here in a long time!” they said, wide-eyed, half-accusingly. Michael had spoken with them, separately; he found that the boys were more tractable, less excitable, when they were apart, and each could speak in confidence, without the other hearing. But Joel swore he hadn’t seen Mr. Sears, and Kenny swore he hadn’t seen him. Michael asked, gently, who the man was described as the “dark man” by one of the Riverside teachers, and each boy said, unhesitating, “Nobody! There was nobody there!”

  Daddy tried to smile, Daddy was being very patient.

  “Nobody? At all?”

  Joel with his beautiful greenish-blue eyes, thickly lashed as a doll’s, his fair hair, his skin hot to the touch, “Nobody, Daddy! Nobody!” as if Daddy were hard of hearing.

  And Kenny with his beautiful greenish-blue eyes, thickly lashed as a doll’s, his fair hair, skin hot to the touch, his manner just slightly more antic than his brother’s, “Nobody, Daddy! No-body!” nearly shouting in Daddy’s startled face.

  Afterward, Gina reported to Michael that she’d heard the boys shrieking with laughter up in their room: had he mixed them up? Joel with Kenny, Kenny with Joel?

  “You really should be more careful about that, darling,” Gina said, regarding Michael with affectionate eyes. “You know how it sets them off.”

  So too had Marita refused to explain why she was quitting her employment with the O’Mearas. When Gina offered her a raise, and, in desperation, shorter hours, Marita said quickly, “Thank you, Mrs. O’Meara. But it isn’t that.”

  “Then what is it?” Gina asked.

  This was a telephone conversation; thus Gina could not see the young woman’s face. She sensed reluctance, dread. Distaste.

  “Mrs. O’Meara, I got to hang up now.”

  “Is it—was it—somebody harassing you, here?—following you?—threatening you?”

  But Marita only murmured something apologetic and hung up.

  Gina came to Michael in tears. He was moved by how distressed she was, at this defection of Marita’s: it seemed to upset her more than the other incidents.

  She said, biting her lower lip, looking up at Michael appealingly, “It’s just so hard to believe, isn’t it, that Lee Roy doesn’t like us any longer!”

  Michael held her in his arms, to comfort her. Poor Gina!—even with such evidence, she could not bring herself to utter the word hate.

  This nightmare time.

  When, like any normal man, Michael O’Meara fantasized attacking his enemy, beating him into submission.

  Killing him?—maybe.

  “To protect Gina, to protect the boys—what wouldn’t I do!”

  As the police had advised, Michael decided to wait it out; to do nothing to deliberately arouse Lee Roy Sears’s further animosity. He knew by way of the grapevine in Mount Orion that Lee Roy was still with Valeria Darrell, that the two were often seen together at jazz nightclubs in one or another of the suburban communities spawned by the new corporate industries along Route One, east of Mount Orion; he was told that Lee Roy had sold some of his art—to whom, for how much, wasn’t clear. “Good for him,” Michael said. Thinking, Maybe then he will leave us alone.

  There were further incidents, however: Michael was sure he was followed one evening, in his car, driving home from work: by someone whose face he could not see clearly, in a car of no particular distinction. (Did Lee Roy Sears have a car, now?—a driver’s license?)

  And, despite their unlisted number, the O’Mearas still received, now and then, mysterious telephone calls, when no one identified himself at the other end of the line. (Of course, maybe the caller was not Lee Roy Sears?—who could know?)

  Michael kept in contact with H. Sigman, whom Lee Roy was obliged to see every two weeks, and who sometimes made surprise visits to Lee Roy at the halfway house. So far as the parole officer knew, Lee Roy Sears was making a satisfactory adjustment to society; and there was the prospect of his career as an artist. And, importantly, Sears had a stabilizing factor in his life—“This lady friend of his, I believe she has assets?”

  This was a telephone conversation. Michael smiled wryly. “She does,” he said.

  “There’s talk of marriage, is there?” Sigman asked.

  “Is there?”

  “Lee Roy has hinted, a few times. He seems okay.”

  “That’s good. That’s wonderful. I mean—that he seems okay.”

  “Thanks to people like you, Mr. O’Meara. In my line of work, I can tell you, there are not many people like you, willing to give these guys a chance. If it wasn’t for people like you, Mr. O’Meara,” Sigman said, extravagantly, as if moved by his own rhetoric, “these poor bastards wouldn’t have a chance!”

  “Well,” said Michael.

  “It’s so. The average person, he doesn’t want to touch an ex-con, any kind of ex-inmate, with a ten-foot pole. But you know that, I guess.”

  Michael said, as cheerfully as he could manage, “Maybe, if his career takes off, Lee Roy Sears could move to New York?—him and his new wife, both?”

  “Sure, he’d be okayed for that,” Sigman said expansively, as if nothing would please him more. “No special reason for him to stay in Putnam, then.”

  “No special reason!” Michael said.

  A fantasy. But a happy fantasy.

  Lips on his!—waking him! So delicious.

  His eyes flew open, and he saw Gina, lovely Gina, her eyes wide and dilated as a cat’s, leaning over him, pink tongue poking out, just the tip of it, between her pursed lips.

  “Sweetie, wake up! Your neck must be broken! If you’re sleepy, why don’t you go to bed?—no need to wait up for me.”

  It was a snowy evening in early February. Michael O’Meara, exhausted from his long day at Pearce, had fallen asleep in his leather chair, in his study, sometime between the hour of nine o’clock and—what was it now?—eleven-thirty.

  Gina had had to be out for the evening, unavoidably—she was newly elected to the executive committee, unless it was the fund-raising committee, or the social committee, of the Friends of the Dumont Center—or was it the Friends of the Mount Orion Symphony.

  Returning with complaints of exhaustion, herself, though, as always, Gina looked poised, cool, effervescent, lovely. Saying, chiding, with a quick caress of her hand along Michael’s warm cheek, “I love you, darling, I hate to see you dozing off like, oh I don’t know, like some homeless person, in Penn Station!—let’s go to bed.”

  Michael, sleep-dazed, heaved himself to his feet, and followed after.

  It seemed a very long time ago, he’d had supper, prepared by the new girl, Clara, and had helped her put Joel and Kenny to bed.

  A very long time ago.

  Since his solitary meal, Michael had been working in his study, at his desk, as, most evenings, he worked at his desk, preparing Pearce’s elaborate defense in the $50 million Peverol suit; sifting through pages of legal documents, photocopied material, and, tonight, catalogues from mail-order rifle companies, with special annotated material pertaining to the AK-47 assault rifle, the weapon used to kill seven people, and the gunman himself, in Memphis. Michael’s vision had blurred, despite new prescription glasses for reading; he must have slipped into sleep, as one might slip into warm, soothing water, with no clear awareness of what was happening.

  Gina led him upstairs, fingers clasped through his. “My poor honey!—it breaks my heart to see you look so tired,” she said. “I hope you aren’t thinking about—him.”

  “Not at all,” Michael said quickly. “I think the situation is under control.”

  “Everyone I saw today asked about you and said they missed you. Stan says he never sees you on the squash court any longer, and Jack and Pam are so disappointed about next Friday, and—even Marvin Bruns, whom we scarcely know, he was asking after you too. So, you see, Michae
l O’Meara, how popular you are!—even in your absence.”

  It was true, Michael had all but dropped out of Mount Orion’s civic social life, since the previous fall. He did not want to think that he was obsessed with his work, still less that he was obsessed with Lee Roy Sears, for, in fact, he was not an obsessive or compulsive personality: it worried him that others might misunderstand.

  “As soon as this Memphis case is decided, I’ll be back to normality again. I promise.”

  “Of course!—that’s what you always say.”

  But Gina forgave him, and kissed him, with a quick teasing probe of her pink tongue.

  That night, perversely unable to sleep when he wanted to sleep, Michael found himself leaving Gina (how blissfully, how like a baby she slept!) and going downstairs, like a sleepwalker, though awake, on bare, silent feet, with a need to ascertain something; to hold something in his hand, out of his past.

  He then found himself rummaging through old books, most of them paperbacks, not glanced at in many years, since his intense hopeful days at the theological seminary. At the age of forty he was hungry for moral guidance—he seemed to have no source for it, no model of it, in the world he now inhabited.

  With a quickening pulse, in his pajamas, shivering, in a bedroom at the rear of the house Gina used as an infrequent guestroom, eagerly reading through his much-annotated paperback of Tolstoy’s My Religion, last consulted in 1969. How hypnotic to Michael O’Meara, as to Tolstoy, the wisdom of Jesus as preserved in the Book of Matthew:

  It has been said unto you, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That you resist not evil.

  In compelling prose, Tolstoy explains how, encountering this utterly simple, direct verse in Matthew, at the age of fifty, after thirty-five years of nihilism, he had experienced a complete conversion of his heart. The direction of Tolstoy’s life, his desires, the very timbre of his personality—all were transformed, violently and irrevocably.

  It has been said unto you, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That you resist not evil.

  Michael had been awkwardly squatting in front of a bookshelf, reading in the book; straightening, he winced with pain—his right knee seemed swollen.

  How like a riddle the verse from Matthew was, teasing, mesmerizing:

  It has been said unto you, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That you resist not evil.

  Michael wondered, What does it mean, really? Had Tolstoy himself understood? “Resist not evil.”

  Next morning, on his way to work, Michael O’Meara locked his copy of Tolstoy’s My Religion in the glove compartment of the Mazda. He was never to glance into it again, but, then, he had no need of doing so.

  VIII

  1

  Never will she see her assailant’s face.

  Never will she hear her assailant’s voice.

  So deft! so quick! an arm snaking around her neck, from behind!

  And the blade, the swift terrible blade, the razor blade, or is it blades, many blades, slashing, digging, tearing into her flesh. Oh! oh! oh!

  Sometime after dark, a rainy dusk mixed with sleet. That smell of wet cement, that urban smell, gritty, yet romantic: as high-rise parking garages adjacent to high-rise luxury hotels are romantic in our time.

  So romantic!—her heart fairly faints.

  So romantic!—thinking of certain things, fresh memories, she’s nearly in a swoon.

  I love you, I’m crazy about you, oh God.

  And I love you.

  No but listen, my God I mean it.

  I mean it!

  Kicking, pummeling, laughing. Like a jackhammer, his hips.

  Oh God, that sweet-tingling sensation in her loins.

  Even now she could scream, scream … scream.

  Like embers, slow-dying embers, so sweet. It will stay with her, lodged snug and secret up deep inside her, the velvety-silky purse of her, for hours.

  Back in Mount Orion, Glenway Circle, home.

  Back with them. Who scarcely know her.

  So, now: walking swiftly, to the elevator.

  Swiftly, not at all fearfully, in this deserted place.

  Heels smartly rap! rap! rapping! on the stained cement floor.

  (Why isn’t she fearful, at least cautious?—a woman, alone, a beautiful woman, alone, in a russet-red fox fur, alone, at this twilit hour, rain mixed with sleet, and a half-hour drive on the Parkway ahead?—because her mind is so luxuriantly elsewhere.)

  (And they’d drunk an entire bottle of French champagne, and devoured a hefty platter of beluga caviar, seventy-five dollars an ounce: and why not? So much to celebrate!)

  She takes the elevator (smelly little cube-shaped cage) to level C of the parking garage. The door opens sluggishly: what if she’s trapped: dismissing the thought at once, because she isn’t.

  As, in the bath, the fragrant bubbly rosy-tinted bath, she’d glanced down smiling at her white body with its rose-pink blood-pink cast like a shadow in the very same instant dismissed the thought because she isn’t that kind of woman.

  Her pretty watch, slipped hastily on her thin wrist, is upside-down!—thus, glancing at it, wondering what’s the time, she doesn’t absorb the time, but no matter.

  An irony, an oddity, unless of course it’s purely chance: never in memory has she slipped any watch of hers on upside-down, until now.

  Even in extreme haste.

  Oh!—damn you you let me fall asleep.

  I let you?—what about me?

  I’m the one with a family, not you!

  So: whose fault is that?

  Her hair is still damp, at the ends. Tendrils of damp. Shivery.

  She’d fussed with the blow-dryer, which had seemed always about to fly out of her hand, up into the air. Laughing, his face in the mirror beside hers, an olive-tan skin, good strong grinning teeth. Seizing her around the waist, beneath her breasts, with his sinewy hairy-dark arms.

  The two of them in those white terrycloth robes that come with such rooms, in the better newer hotels.

  Can you put this on your expense account?

  Does a fish swim?—does a bird fly?

  Oh, you’re—impossible!

  You’re delicious.

  D’you know—in brain research—the latest discovery—it’s the left brain that makes up theories, stories—for things that the right brain experiences—so—so!—let’s do what we want to do, and make up the reasons later!

  That, I always knew!

  Slipping his hands inside the terrycloth robe. Squeezing her breasts, which are already sore.

  Oh, damn you!—that hurts.

  Does it?

  Level C, and only a few cars remaining. It’s an open garage and cold damp gusty-exhilarating air touches her face. In the near distance, high-rise lights, headlights of vehicles, in the shifting sky winking lights of airliners: how we love our world, the romance of our world, because it’s ours.

  And that tingling erotic pulsation in her loins, oh God that.

  That, and the giddy glasses of champagne, have very possibly clouded her judgment.

  March 1. She will remember, but only in retrospect.

  At the moment, discovering her car (she’d forgotten where the hell she’d parked it; when the level is nearly full the space looks entirely different), she could not have said the date, the time, oh who cares, her husband won’t be home when she gets there anyway.

  Working late. Working working late. Late, late.

  He’s a great guy, I really admire him. I mean, hell—he’s nice.

  Yes. He is.

  You love him I guess?

  I love him. I guess.

  You’ve been married—how long?

  All my life.

  Approaching her car, yes that is her car, parked at the very rear, in a corner, she’d sort of forgotten parking it in a corner but she’d been in a hurry, panicked at being so late.

  Just a coincidence—she isn’t really thinking
of this—keys in her gloved hand, stooping to unlock the door (but did she lock the doors?—can’t remember) her breath steaming faintly about her mouth, just a coincidence, and no connection, she finds herself thinking of poor Clyde Somerset, who’d been mugged the week before in the parking lot behind the Dumont Center, shocking! incredible! a mugging! in the very heart of Mount Orion!—what bad luck for Clyde that there were no witnesses, the poor man so savagely beaten his jaw was broken, teeth knocked out, ribs cracked, Clyde, who isn’t in the very best physical condition (so ruddy in the face, you can see he has high blood pressure, can’t Susanne make him diet?), thus lucky to be alive, lucky the heart attack wasn’t fatal.

  No. Unfortunately. He didn’t see his assailant’s face.

  Didn’t hear his assailant’s voice.

  Poor Clyde, unable to identify the mugger.

  (Yes, of course, the police were provided with the name of a likely suspect, a suspect who might have wished revenge upon Clyde Somerset, but how to connect the suspect with the crime if there is no evidence?—if, apparently, he was somewhere else at the time, and someone will so swear?)

  But she isn’t thinking of this really. Not in her happy floating mood.

  Why not, look, I deserve some happiness too for God’s sake, I am not just a wife and a mother, if that’s what you think you don’t know me. And I’m still young.

  She slides into the driver’s seat, loves the aroma of the new car, sleek black leather seats, she’d wanted a Mercedes for years and, now: her Christmas present from Michael here it is.

  They’d traded in the Honda hatchback, so suburban-boring.

  If that’s what you think all of you you don’t know me.

  Oh!—beautiful. De-li-ci-ous.

  Scooping up caviar on the pale stoneground crackers, laughing, greedy. Licking the tiny jelly-eggs where some had fallen, on his chest. His nipples too.

  Always makes her giggle, shivery-giggle, that men have nipples too. That, there, inside their bodies (their bodies that are so nice, sometimes), there they are—just like us.