Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  You think it's easy?

  Let me explain the second line. Child-murderer is an “idea.” I am writing this memoir in a rented room, ignoble enough and smelling of garbage, and outside in the street children are playing. Normal, like you and everyone who chances upon these sweaty words of mine, the children are making noise. Normal people always make noise. So it crosses my desperate, corrupt, cobwebbed mind, my flabby cringing mind, that those noises could be silenced in the way I once silenced someone else. Already you are struggling and tugging with your distaste, eh? You're tempted to glance at the back of this book to see if the last chapter is a prison scene and a priest visits me and I either stoically refuse him or embrace his knees manfully. Yes, you are thinking of doing that. So I might as well tell you that my memoir will not end in any such convenient way; it isn't well-rounded or hemmed in by fate in the shape of novelistic architecture. It certainly isn't well-planned. It has no conclusion but just dribbles off, in much the same way it begins. This is life. My memoir is not a confession and it is not fiction to make money; it is simply… I am not sure what it is. Until I write it all out I won't even know what I think about it.

  Look at my hands tremble! I am not well. I weigh two hundred and fifty pounds and I am not well, and if I told you how old I am you would turn away with a look of revulsion. How old am I? Did I stop growing on that day when “it” happened, note the shrewd passivity of that phrase, as if I hadn't made “it” happen myself, or did I maybe freeze into what I was, and outside of that shell layers and layers of fat began to form? Writing this is such hard work that I have to stop and wipe myself with a large handkerchief. I sweat all over. And those children outside my window! I think they are unkillable anyway. Life keeps on, getting noisier and noisier as I get quieter and quieter, and all these normal, noisy, healthy people around me keep pressing in, mouths full of laughing teeth and biceps charmingly bulging. At the second in which the slick lining of my stomach finally bursts, some creature next door will turn her radio from Bill Sharpe's “Weather Round-Up” to Guy Prince's “Top-Ten Jamboree.”

  This memoir is a hatchet to slash through my own heavy flesh and through the flesh of anyone else who happens to get in the way.

  One thing I want to do, my readers, is to minimize the tension between writer and reader. Yes, there is tension. You think I am trying to put something over on you, but that isn't true. It isn't true. I am honest and dogged and eventually the truth will be told; it will just take time because I want to make sure everything gets in. I realize my sentences are slack and flabby and composed of too many small words—I'll see if I can't fix that. And you are impatient because I can't seem to get started telling this story in any normal way (I don't mean to be ironic so much, irony is an unpleasant character trait), and you would like to know, whimsically enough, whether I am in a mental institution now or crazy in some less official setting, whether I am repentant (a tongue-less monk, maybe), whether much gore will be splattered throughout these pages, many violent encounters between male and female, and whether after these extravaganzas I am justly punished. Just punishment after illicit extravaganzas is usually served up for the benefit of the reader, who feels better. But, you see, this is not fiction. This is life. My problem is that I don't know what I am doing. I lived all this mess but I don't know what it is. I don't even know what I mean by “it.” I have a story to tell, yes, and no one else could tell it but me,but if I tell it now and not next year it will come out one way, and if I could have forced my fat, heaving body to begin this a year ago it would have been a different story then. And it's possible that I'm lying without knowing it. Or telling the truth in some weird, symbolic way without knowing it, so only a few psychoanalytic literary critics (there are no more than three thousand) will have access to the truth, what “it” is.

  So there is tension, all right, because I couldn't begin the story by stating: One morning in January a yellow Cadillac pulled up to a curb. And I couldn't begin the story by stating: He was an only child. (Both these statements are quite sensible, by the way, though I could never talk about myself in the third person.)

  And I couldn't begin the story by stating: Elwood Everett met and wed Natashya Romanov when he was thirty-two and she was nineteen. (Those are my parents! It took me some time to type out their names.)

  And I couldn't begin the story with this pathetic flourish: The closet door opened suddenly and there he stood, naked. He stared in at me and I stared out at him. (And that also will come to pass, though I hadn't intended to mention it so soon.)

  All these devices are fine and I offer them to any amateur writer who wants them, but for me they don't work because … I'm not sure why. It must be because the story I have to tell is my life, synonymous with my life, and no life begins anywhere. If you have to begin your life with a sentence, better make it a brave summing up and not anything coy: I was a child murderer.

  My readers, don't fret, don't nibble at your nails: indeed I was punished. Indeed I am being punished. My misery is proof of God's existence—yes, I'll offer that to you as a special bonus! It will do your souls good to read of my suffering. You'll want to know when my crime took place, and where. And what do I look like, this fat degenerate, dripping sweat over his manuscript, and how the hell old am I anyway, and whom did I kill, and why, and what sense does it make?

  2

  AN INCIDENTAL HISTORICAL NOTE

  Let us cast our minds about through history and see what precedents I have. A child murderer is discussed in two oblique and strangely elusive passages in Hardyng, in the second century of our era: a child of eight who must have accomplished something monstrous but who passes by silently, nameless and damned. What a loss!

  Then there is a monograph by the historian Wren, on the Nietz-schean “eternal return,” which judges that grave concept (justifiably?) as nonsense but goes on to speculate, with a whimsy I admire, on the repetitions, throughout eternity, of the bizarre crimes of this Peter Lully, a child of tender years who butchered his five brothers and sisters, including a baby in his cradle and, because it bothered him, the family's shepherd dog as well. No motive is given, of course. We children are always denied sensible motives by the adults who write up our crimes. (I say “we” though I am no longer a child. My soul is a child's soul, however.)

  Then there is the well-known, rather tawdry incident reported in a letter of Flaubert to Louise Colet, in which he remarked—with a savagery absolutely unfound in other of his smooth, rather phony correspondence—of the French peasant child, also nameless, who pushed his grandfather into the fire and swatted him with a broom so that the poor man could not escape. The senseless, barbaric cruelty is what caught Flaubert's attention, but I ask, is it really senseless? Barbaric, yes, and cruel to a degree that makes me want to retch, but senseless?

  In literature we have a few incidents, none of them first-rate: the allusion in a lesser Chaucerian tale of a child warrior (though that's beyond my interest), the allusion in Macbeth to Lady Macbeth, as a child, wantonly doing away with a “blessed babe,” no doubt a sibling, and Stendhal's exasperating references to a certain irrevocable crime of Julien's, committed when he was four—that precocious hypocrite! But I think you'll agree there isn't much. A photostat of a lithograph by a seventeenth-century Spaniard is on its way to me—with the promise of flagrant, fragrant hints of corruption that could be nurtured only in a warm, masculine climate—but all this is beside the point, mere fluff, mere airy, bubbly frosting of the kind that evaporates on cake overnight and disappoints children in the morning.

  In modern times these incidents have become more popular: I have compiled an alphabetical list of child criminals, beginning with Ajax, Arnold, and proceeding through Mossman, Billie, and ending with Watt, Samuel, all of them decently enough treated by society despite their obvious depravities. Oh, yes, I should mention Lilloburo, Anjette, the only girl on my list: she put insecticide in the grape drink she was selling on the sidewalk before her parents' modest frame house, a
child of only seven but already corrupt and damned; two of her little friends died. I have purposefully omitted mention of Bobbie Hutter, who burned up four classmates in a tree house in West Bend, Indiana, so don't bother sending me this information. That child was mentally retarded and hadn't much idea what he was doing and—don't you see?— I have no patience with accidents. I don't want whimsy or lies, blunders, trivia. I want the real thing. The real thing: a crime of murder committed with all premeditation by a child in full possession of his own wits, with a certain minimal level of intelligence. Yes, we child murderers are snobs.

  3

  One morning in January a yellow Cadillac pulled up to a curb. And let's freeze that scene so I can sketch it all in. You see the Cadillac? Good. See if you can smell its new leathery odor. Yellow is a funny color for so dignified a car, you're thinking? Yes, but yellow was my mother's favorite color, or she liked to say or pretend that it was, for reasons of her own. So the car was yellow because my mother demanded yellow, and yellow it had to be, though my father wanted black. His own car was yellow too, and her car was yellow. They could never decide which of the cars belonged to which one of them—this Cadillac or the other car, the Lincoln. (They had friends in more than one automobile company.) The yellow Cadillac pulled up to a curb. It's January, you notice, and the street is a little icy, and the sidewalks, though constantly cleaned, have a cold, hard, bare look that they have only in winter. The grass is partly covered with snow and partly bare,old dried-up brown tufts you wouldn't waste a second glance at, and in the car are four interesting people:

  The driver, a sharp-featured, pale man with a look of restraint, as if he finds it difficult to hold back his smiles of enthusiasm and good cheer. (He is the real-estate salesman.)

  The woman sitting beside him, with a dark mink collar lifting up about her throat, her skin pale and glowing with the winter light and her lips pursed after a morning of disappointments and her eyes (those lovely eyes!) hidden at this moment by sunglasses. (This is my mother, Natashya Romanov Everett. She is thirty but looks twenty-five, twenty, eighteen! Any age!)

  The man sitting behind her, leaning forward, smoking a cigar thoughtfully. He has a broad, round face, tanned from a recent and excellent Bermuda holiday, and there are bulges of flesh under his eyes that look as if he or someone else has been tugging down at them, and he has a nose with veins too close to the surface (tough luck, you people who have this trouble!), and yet he is an attractive man. No one could say why, but he is considered an “attractive” man. He is wearing a new winter overcoat—handsome and expensive in the store but rumpled and bargain-basement once he has it on—and it is unbuttoned even in winter because he sweats a lot, this man, this noisy, blustering, pathetic, attractive man, my father. He says, “Uh-huh, not bad. How does it look to you, Tashya?”

  And next to him a child, not interesting as misleadingly promised, but runty and worried, an old man already, with his mother's thin, hawkish, sniffing nose and his father's drooping eyes, shivering in the blast of heat that radiates from the front heater (will nothing ever get him warm, that doomed, damned child?). Of course, that is 1.1 am ten.

  Now, on the far side of the street (I am considering your point of view) is a handsome old house, set back from the sidewalk, English Tudor of an Americanized sort, with great hunks of plate glass and standard evergreen shrubs, etc. You've seen thousands of such houses. And now, if you'll turn—notice how cautious I am, wanting you to see and feel everything without confusion—if you'll turn you will see what those four people are staring at. Another house. A house, that's all. A bastardized French-American affair, brick painted white, with balconies of wrought iron fastened somehow beneath the four big second-floor windows, and a big double door with gold, or gold-plated brass, knobs. The house has been built atop a hill, and all eyes are drawn to it. Banks and clumps of expensive evergreens run down in a friendly riot along the edge of the “circle” driveway to the street.

  What else do you need to know? An ordinary day, partly cloudy. But Nada,* my mother, will wear sunglasses if the sky is totally overcast; she is that kind of woman. Anything else? Automobiles passing by? Just a few, and they are either nondescript cars driven by Negro maids on their way to the Continental Market Basket or the post office or the Fernwood Dry Cleaners or to the movie houses, with a few children, all white, bundled in the back seat; or large cars driven by suburban matrons of any age driving to or from luncheons, to or from bridge games, receptions, showers, round-table discussions, sculpting class, painting class, ballet class, “Psychology for the Home” class, “Great Books of the 60's” class …

  Everything is sketched in. Now let us bring the scene to life.

  The Cadillac pulled up to the curb. My father, leaning forward, spoke around his cigar with the public deference one uses in Fernwood toward wives. “What do you think of this one, Tashya?”

  My mother was staring up at the house. The salesman, whose name was Howie Hansom, kept looking at the house himself though I could see that his face was getting strained. I could see his profile and the off-white of his eye. He and I were comrades in all this, but he did not know it or would not let on. If he happened to glance at me it was with the look you address to a squirrel: a pest supposed to be cute.

  “Well, Tashya, what say we try it?” Father said heartily. He stirred himself and gave the impression that everyone was moving, everything had come to life; that was Father's style. “I know you're exhausted, Tashya, but we're out here now and Mr. Hansom would be disappointed if we didn't go in. Wouldn't you, Mr. Hansom?”

  Mr. Hansom's profile tightened and he looked over at my parents, smiling. His smile was like a small, muted shriek, but they would never have noticed—something was in the air between them, some private, tugging tension. Mr. Hansom said, “I'd like very much to show you through this lovely house. I have the key here, of course …”

  “Tashya?”

  They waited. She drew in at last a long, exasperated breath, as if she'd been dragged all the way out here by these men and had no choice but to go through with their foolishness. Without answering, she opened the door and flung it out (a door that weighed a ton, built like a fortress), and we had a glimpse of her reddening, impatient ear, just the tip of it through her dark hair.

  “Ah, here we are. Fine, fine,” Father said cheerfully, rubbing his hands.

  We all got out and trudged up to the house.

  “Now, first of all, I'd like to know the price of this house,” Father said.

  “You'll notice that the house has three stories, and there is of course a swimming pool and a bathhouse, an automatic sprinkler system—”

  “The price?” Father said politely.

  “Eighty thousand five hundred,” Mr. Hansom said rapidly and went on in a louder, flatter voice, “and a tax you won't believe, and a neighborhood absolutely unparalleled …”

  I caught up to Nada and we walked ahead of the two men. I could see what they couldn't, that her cheeks were a little flushed and her nose looked as if it were sniffing at something forbidden. I knew that look. She glanced down at me and said, “Be sure to wipe your feet,” and it was just nothing, not even an insult, just words for her to say to show that she remembered me and that she had power over me. And she reached out to rub my head, once, hard, to let me know that everything would turn out well. Behind us Father was striding up like a hunter, and Howie Hansom was puffing from the hill.

  Mr. Hansom unlocked the front door and we stepped into a brick-lined area, and he opened another double door, French doors, and we were in an entrance foyer, quite large, oval. Need I describe this? You know the usual black-and-white tile, the French Provincial mirror with its pressed fake gold frame that gives you a face sooner than you might want it, and a staircase rearing up to a phantom second floor, and a crystal chandelier descending from heaven itself. Very nice.

  “Hm, uh-hmmm,” Father said, clapping his hands as if he'd discovered something suspicious. My father made brief, explosi
ve, meaningless noises all the time. Or were they meaningless? Every grunt of Father's made Howie Hansom lick his pale lips and Nada's eyes swing around to a new object. “Well, might as well see it through. Interesting. Very clean, at least,” Father said impassively.

  We were shown through the house. It was empty and echoed our footsteps, Father's blustering words, and Mr. Hansom's enthusiastic, pale words. I felt my eyes begin to close: this was all so familiar to me. God, so familiar! We had seen ten, eleven, fourteen houses in the last two days. Nada hadn't liked any of them. Now we trudged through this house, which was neither more nor less impressive than the others, and Father shook his cigar ashes on the shining, maid-cleaned floor. I noticed how he glanced at Nada, at her expressionless face and those black-rimmed sunglasses of hers, which must have annoyed Father as much as they annoyed me. I wanted to snatch them off and break them in two and say, “Now will you look at me?” Then a crumbled, coy, shrewd look came over my father's face and he said tentatively to Mr. Hansom, “Would you, uh, say that this price is inflated?”

  “Inflated?” Mr. Hansom said, meek and overly surprised. “Why, indeed not. Inflated? This marvelous property?”