Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In our home Mr. Vemeer was fond of exclaiming, as if he were a parody of a provincial French miser out of literature, “Buy a good lawyer and buy him first. That's it. I've been sued now twenty-seven times and no one has collected once, not once, and the secret is to buy the best lawyer and buy him first.”

  Everyone knew this (Fernwood despised lawyers) but no one said it so bluntly; hence Mr. Vemeer was considered crude, ungracious nou-veau riche, and his Catholicism did not help. I overheard many a guest of ours complaining about him, a rapid, whispered “Isn't he awful!” from the throaty depths of Mrs. Hofstadter, a muttered exotic syllable from Mavis Grisell. Tia Bell, her headdress of stacked, banked red-tinted hair quivering, her giantess's frame barely restrained, must have liked Harrison Vemeer in spite of everything because she often giggled, behind a large suntanned hand, “Goodness!” when he launched into one of his anecdotes. He scandalized her. But the gloomy frowns of Dean Nash and his good wife were obvious, and I wanted to tell Nada not to invite Mr. Vemeer back again. Did she want to endanger her standing? Nada was enchanted with Mr. Vemeer because she had the idea he was an ideal businessman and that her guests must certainly admire him and be grateful to her for bringing them all together. Mr. Vemeer's wife never went out; she remained at home with their eight children.

  Anxious to help Nada out, I wrote her a note in big block letters and mailed it from the corner. It said:

  YOU WOULD BE WISE TO DROP VEMEER. HE IS A CROOK.

  When Nada opened this letter she stared at it, puzzled. Then a haughty flush brightened her cheeks and she crumpled the note in her fist.

  I said, “What's that, Nada?”

  “The work of a depraved mind,” she said.

  So I wrote her another note. This said:

  HARRISON VEMEER IS ABOUT TO BE FOUND GUILTY OF FRAUD. YOU WOULD BE WISE TO DROP HIM.

  Nada received this on the morning of the day she and Father were invited to the Vemeers' for a cocktail party, and she did indeed read the note with concern. She said nothing to me. The cocktail party was a failure because no one came except Father and Nada and poor Bebe Hofstadter, desperate for an audience to whom she could tell about the deceit of her maid Hortense, who had invited in a colored gentleman friend of hers and slept in Bebe's bed and then cleared out, not even leaving a note. “Oh, my dears! My dears! I don't think I can face reality again,” Bebe kept moaning. “You should have seen what they did …”

  But what finally decided Nada against Mr. Vemeer was a simple touch of genius on my part. With beautiful innocence I said one day that Farley Weatherun, the grandson of the internationally known Weatheruns, had told me in French class, “Ce Monsieur Vemeer, ilestlaid” and why had he said that? “I always thought Mr. Vemeer was kind of nice,” I told Nada. “Why would Farley Weatherun say anything so mean?”

  “He must have had his reasons,” Nada said slowly.

  After a moment she put her hands to her eyes and sat there in silence. What was she thinking? She might have been overcome with the chaos of trivia and garbage that had overturned upon her. I could almost read her mind. I stared up at her pale, nervous hands and thought: If she would just look at me and talk to me I could save her. But she sat like that for a while, alone and shivering. Then her hands dropped away suddenly and she lit a cigarette. She was smoking too much these days, and I hunted up news articles in the paper to show her, about the dangers of smoking.

  “Nada, you okay?”

  “Of course, Honey.”

  “You look kind of pale.”

  “I'm really quite all right,” she said, smiling to show me she was all right. “Tell me, are you very good friends with that Weatherun boy?”

  But her facial muscles tightened as she spoke, as if something inside her hated the very sound of those words. It made me feel sick to see how she looked at me as if I were no better than anything else in this world. A chill ran up my body and I wondered if I was really going to be sick, again, and maybe that would be good because she couldn't leave home if I was sick. She couldn't leave me if I was sick.

  Yes, I loved her, and do you know how I remember her most? Not dazzling and lovely, greeting her guests, and not pale with despair as she was sometimes, turned away from Father, from a few fast-spat words that had passed between them, but off, off on her own: strolling down the front walk to the street with a letter to mail, her hair loose, girlish and quite alone, with the look of a person absolutely free and meaning no harm, no harm.

  15

  One morning at breakfast Nada said to me, “Can I interrupt you?”

  I was jotting down cheat-notes for a history quiz to be given in an hour, but I looked up politely.

  “Richard, I was talking to Mr. Nash about something that means a great deal to me. I don't want to upset you or worry you, but, frankly, Mr. Nash was kind enough to tell me the results of your entrance examination. That's something he usually refuses to do, because some mothers take these things too seriously. Anyway, he did tell me, and I'm afraid I was a little disappointed with your IQ^score.”

  “What was it?”

  “I can't tell you. But I was a little disappointed.”

  My heart hung large and heavy in my chest. I watched Nada's fine white teeth bite off a piece of toast and chew on it, the way she was chewing on me, and I tried to make my haggard face look pleasant. “Yeah, well, I'm real sorry. What was the score?”

  “I said I can't tell you,” Nada said patiently. “But it was lower than my own. That's ridiculous, I don't accept it. You know, Richard, I don't want you to be less than I am. I want you to be better than I am. I can't bear the thought of some kind of degenerative process setting in. I see myself as less than my father was, and now you … Do you understand?”

  “I guess it isn't anything we can help much,” I said feebly.

  “I'm not so sure about that. I've made arrangements with Mr. Nash for you to take the test again.”

  “What?”

  “I've made arrangements for you to take the test again.”

  “The test again?”

  “Just part of it. Half of it, I think.”

  “But, Mother,” I said, my stomach beginning to tremble where no one could see, and even laughing to show her how calm I was, “Mother, if my IQjs a certain IQ^, it won't matter how many tests I take, will it?”

  “Please don't call me that,” she said.

  “But it won't matter, will it? I mean, will it? The test is just a measure. It… isn't—”

  “I want you to take it again, Richard.”

  “Take it again? That test?”

  “Yes, Richard.”

  We stared sadly at each other. I did not know and I do not know today how much she hated herself for all these things. Every word of hers, every gesture, was phony as hell, and as time passed in Fernwood this phoniness grew upon her steadily, like the layers of fat I have encircling my body. But who was going to rescue her? Once or twice I caught her, sitting alone, staring out into our unused backyard and screwing her face around in a mannerism not her own: drawing her lips down, tightly pursed, and seeming to lift her nose slightly as if straining for purer air. But no, Dean Nash wouldn't help. I never found out how close they were, Nash and Nada. But though they would have been a fine couple—he was no more than Father's age though he looked younger—I don't think she got much strength from him. He was just a son-of-a-bitch anyway, as you'll see.

  16

  And was I good friends with that Weatherun boy?

  I got to know him through Gustave Hofstadter, who had become my best, indeed, my only, friend. Gustave and I were fond of playing chess, which we played seriously and silently, like two little old men in a terminal ward of a hospital. If we played at his house (a baronial estate with a house that was gabled, ornamented, towered, as cute as a gingerbread house in a Mother Goose story), Bebe ran in and out of the room, looking for things she could never find, and shot at us muttered remarks: “Still playing that game! Still at it! I don't understand children �
� Such a sunny day…” If we played at my house we had the sweet, serene quiet of the library, bathed with winter sunlight, the feel of a house empty and silent everywhere except for Ginger's vacuum cleaner roaring away upstairs, while Ginger probably rifled through Nada's bureau drawers (I had caught her at it once). We loved and respected the game of chess, both of us. Gustave was going into math and I had no idea where I was going—indeed I couldn't have predicted exactly where I would end up!—but I joined him in his admiration for this precise and beautiful game, which leaves nothing to chance, unlike that hideous game, Bridge, which Nada pretended to like, or that still more hideous game of life. (You can trust a degenerate to turn philosophical.)

  Another chess-lover was Farley Weatherun, who was a freshman at Johns Behemoth. Farley was a slow, gentle, distracted boy who had the best room in the dormitory with the exception of a couple of rooms in the seniors' wing. His family was famous and indeed is still famous. You will find one Weatherun or another mentioned constantly in gossip columns or in Time magazine (“Aqualung Enthusiast Si Weatherun Announces His …”; “Socialite-Flutist Virginia Weatherun Announces Her …”; “Admiral-Playboy ‘Taffy’ Weatherun Announces His …”). But fame counted for little at Johns Behemoth, where it was vulgar to speak of anyone's family, especially your own, since you were supposed to be an individual and nothing more. Nothing less. The president of the school, a waspy wispy man named Sikes, told us repeatedly that we were on our own, each of us was a young man, an individual working his way through life. And, indeed, we did work.

  Farley, with his amiable slowness, had a difficult time. He spent hours copying other boys' homework (at that time it cost you fifty cents to copy homework from a good student; the rates have probably risen), and even copying seemed hard for him. He'd leave out whole sentences or, in mathematics, ledges of numerals, decimal points, or digits that rendered everything invalid. Gustave and I liked him, but playing chess with him was frustrating because he took so long to make his moves. He had a pale, freckled face, a milky skin beneath the freckles that was rather like Nada's skin, hands that were just as freckled as his face, and gnawed knuckles. It seemed to me that he was as sickly as I, because he was always taking medicine and pills of one kind or another.

  He'd stare at the move I had just made, look up at me keenly, gnaw at a knuckle, and say, “'Cuse just a minnit.” He would go to his closet, inside which was a small refrigerator, and take out a bottle and drink from it. The bottle had an angular, medicinal appearance. If Gustave was with us, curled up on the bed and studying French, I would notice how Gustave glanced up at Farley's back and how, if I caught his eye, he would ignore me. If I was alone I speculated about cheating, moving a strategic piece while his back was turned; but I never quite dared to do this. And anyway I always won. Gustave usually beat me, and I usually beat Farley, and Farley would laugh and say, “Shit. Lost again,” in the kind of happy, self-pitying voice Father sometimes used.

  One afternoon he kept going to the refrigerator after every move of mine and finally he brought the mysterious little bottle back to the table with him. “Lemme fix y'up some Coke,” he said. He sounded sleepily pleased. He dropped some ice cubes in two scummy glasses, poured in Coke for us, and said, raising his reddish eyebrows in exactly the same way Father raised his when making a drink, “Y'want some of this?” holding up the bottle for me to see.

  It said “Log Cabin Maple Syrup.”

  “But what's that?” I said.

  His glance slurred by me as if I were beyond hope, and he poured what remained of the dark liquid into his own glass. “Now, son,” he said, “stand back 'cause I'm gonna make my move.”

  He was the first alcoholic I had ever met, and he was only thirteen. It was a surprise to me at that time, though very shortly I was to encounter Blazes Jones, a dazed, moony child of twelve who not only drank secretly but went around humming and muttering under his breath and making pawing motions in the air. Rumored a genius, Blazes was the center of a special clique in which I was never quite allowed—or, to be truthful, I was never allowed in it at all, they didn't want me. So much for him. He has since died.

  And I was shortly to meet Francis Bean, Jr., who took pills of various kinds to keep awake and to keep going merrily; he was sporty and wild, affecting boxlike jackets of olive wool and fur-lined, cream-colored gloves. His sister Greta, a lovely child of fourteen, took these mysterious pills also, and in the last month of my hopeless stay at Fernwood she was reported to “juvenile authorities” for having offered a marijuana cigarette to Suzie, a worker at the Pandora's Box Beauty Salon, in lieu of a dollar tip. All this got around; it was a mild scandal, soon forgotten.

  Farley was my friend. I desperately needed a friend that wretched; he gave me hope in the midst of my hopelessness. I recall him lurching down the corridor to the lavatory, smiling a sick, tilted smile, and, as the snows abated and a false spring came to us in March, plodding around out in the colorless park (called our “green”), kicking last year's leaves around. He wore bedraggled and outgrown clothes, poor pleasant Farley, socks that did not match, underwear with holes in it. His family sent him money in spasms, forgetting him for long periods, and he used what spending money he received for liquor. His sweaters were always worn thin at the elbows, and he forgot to wear a white shirt under them, de rigueur at Johns Behemoth, so his necktie was no more than a bowtie on a black elastic band that fastened around his neck. Sometimes I saw him late in the morning, just rushing out of his dormitory with his bowtie crooked around his bony, doomed neck and his red hair rising in ghastly dry tufts above his face—stumbling and staggering, his eyes no more than slits against the light. He bought his liquor from someone in the village, a restaurant owner who had once said hello to Admiral-Playboy Weatherun and was inordinately proud of this fact. Farley was rumored to get a very reasonable price.

  17

  “There is this boy at school, from Boston, who's so miserable and mean,” I told Nada. There was a galaxy, a menagerie of odd misfits in the fake Johns Behemoth I had constructed for her, all extensions of myself, with problem parents that were extensions of my parents; I made everything up, out of a peculiar distrust of the truth. It would never have occurred to me to tell my parents the truth about anything. “His mother is an alcoholic and he loves her a lot, I guess. He worries about her.”

  “That sounds terrible,” Nada said.

  She fixed her eyes upon me, not to see if I was lying—why would I lie?—but to see how far my childish mind had assessed the gravity of the situation. I made a habit, in those days, of saying things I couldn't possibly have understood, in my innocence.

  “Are there many unhappy boys in your school, Richard?”

  “I don't know. Maybe.”

  “Do the boys miss their parents?”

  “Sure.”

  “I hope you're friends with them. Don't ignore them.”

  She had the sunny, myopic belief, like all mothers, that her son was popular and had the power to “make friends” with anyone. I always fooled her, and maybe that was my mistake, because if my poor health wasn't enough to keep her at home, maybe my failure as a social organism would have done the trick. But I had too much pride. And anyway I liked to please her. There was nothing so nice as Nada pleased, smiling a real smile, an unfake smile, and showing her lovely teeth. On the day I agreed to take the examination over, she showed her teeth in a breathtaking smile and hugged me, and after I took it she dragged me around to the expensive and pretentious village “shoppes” and bought me a tennis racket, what she thought to be a handsome shirt, two dozen pairs of identical dark blue socks, a book in a series of novels about a boy detective which I had stopped reading years before, and other presents. I remember that day well—it's coming back to me. Yes, I remember it well though I haven't thought about it for years. Let me see: sharp, tangy wood smoke in the air, perhaps an advertising gimmick, and a fine late winter sun, and Mother jauntily beautiful and suburban,leading me around, her precious son,
her darling prodigy who was to carry the genes of genius into the future, brought all the way to America from sad, dark Russia.

  We went into a teen-agers' hangout, luckily deserted at this time on Saturday, and had luxurious ice-cream sundaes for lunch. Have I ever mentioned how Nada ate? She ate as if she expected a disembodied hand suddenly to pull her plate away from her, and if it had she would have continued eating, leaning over the table until she could no longer reach the plate. She was a hungry, greedy woman. She loved food, and when she ate I must admit she let her shoulders slouch a little toward the table, her long-fingered hands delicate and a little bony with the intensity of her eating. Spoons and forks were manipulated in Nada's fingers impatiently; they got in the way, they often clicked and clanked against plates. I believe she ate more than Father did, though she never gained any weight.

  And what a fine day that was! Nada was to be informed the following week that I had done extremely well on the examination, raising my IQ^score by a healthy margin, and Nada was to hug me for this, and talk feverishly of my “career.” I somehow think she wanted me to be a great writer, like Mann and Tolstoi and herself, though she never mentioned this to me. She probably thought it was in my blood and that it would emerge by itself. But even though I didn't yet know I had done so well, I felt that I had at least improved the score that had so disappointed her and that I would carry the Russian genes on to the next generation without damaging them. I was burdened with boxes and bags, all the presents that I greeted with the same smile of gratitude and humility, saying, “Nada, you really don't have to …”