Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And you men, you would all like a Nada of your own. If your income is above a certain level you'd need her to show it off, wouldn't you? That pleasant, sandy-faced woman you married would fade into a living room's beige walls if Nada walked into the room, not just because she was beautiful but because she had … whatever it was certain women have, I don't pretend to know. Your wife supposes herself chic, and salesladies flatter her, but Nada didn't need anyone's flattery. You'd rather have Nada, bitch that she was, and notice other men's envious stares. The reality would be hell, but then reality is always hell.

  Nada, Nada, Nada …

  If this sounds delirious it is because I was a little delirious. There was something so vicious and final about their argument the night before that I knew she was leaving. I think I knew it before she did. All that day she wandered in and out of my room, she sat on the edge of my bed and laid her cool, remote hand on my feverish brow, glancing at me with the dim, mild surprise of a person noticing life in a store dummy or in a corpse. I never meant anything to her, never! I was perhaps some outlandish protoplasmic joke Father had wished upon her one night late after a cocktail party. I was flesh and bone and blood and brain tagged “Richard,” and “Richard” must have evoked in her mind mechanical thoughts of guilt and responsibility and love. She loved me when she was happy. She loved me when she happened to notice me. She loved me if I was good, if Father was good, if she'd been invited out both nights of a weekend, if the world was going well, if the humidity was low and the barometer agreeable: whereas I loved her always, when she was a bitch or when she was saintly, lovely or ugly, with short shining hair or long greasy hair … I loved her and what good did it do either of us?

  “There are certain times in a person's life,” Nada began, trying to smooth out the wrinkles in my sheet with her hand, “when one simply has to shake himself free. You remember how your little puppy Spark used to shake water off himself? Wasn't that cute? Well,” she said, her eyes vague with the impropriety of this metaphor, “well, everyone must free himself of impossible pressures, of restraints and burdens that suffocate him.”

  “If you leave this time, don't bother coming back,” I said.

  “There is nothing personal, never anything personal in freedom,” Nada went on, maybe not hearing me or not caring, “freedom is just a condition one has to achieve. It isn't a new place or a new way of living. It's just a condition like the air that surrounds the earth. We can't breathe without it but—”

  “I know all about the air!” I shouted. “So forget it! Shut up!”

  “Richard, what?”

  “Forget it! Forget everything! Shut up and get out of here!”

  And she stood, quiet and serious, looking at me the way she looked at Father or women with their hair in rollers out on the street or the messes neighborly dogs made on our lawn. Her face was magnificent and pale, her eyes dark, a little demented, as if tiny curving pieces of glass had been fitted over them for some weird theatrical purpose. Oh, I don't know! I don't know what she looked like! I watched and watched her for years. I stared at her and loved her. I have photographs of her in my desk drawer that I finger and caress and still I don't know what she looked like; she passed over from being another person into being part of myself. It was as if Nada, my mother, had become a kind of embryonic creature stuck in my body, not in a womb maybe but a part of my brain. How can you describe a creature that is lodged forever in your brain? It's all impossible, a mess …

  25

  For instance, let me revert to an earlier memory. I am eight years old and asthmatic. Nada nurses me, fusses over me, dresses me in Junior Collegiate Togs: resentful of my sickness for eleven solid sulky days, on the twelfth day she suddenly blossoms with love. Yes, good. All this is familiar enough. Nada—”Call me Nadia, Nadia,” she pouts prettily—Nada blooms and swells with love for me, her son. It's a mystery what is behind it—who knows? An argument with Father? An overheard remark at someone's party questioning Mrs. Everett's moth-erliness? An accidental glance at my red-and-white blotched, mealy face? An article in a doctor's waiting room titled “Do You Harbor Unconscious Hostilities Toward Your Child?”

  Most things remain mysteries.

  Nada bundles me up and piles me in the car, not today will she leave me, not for a moment, absolutely not! She and I are “good friends.” We will “stick together” and “tell each other everything.” When I was eight I had little idea of the vast world beyond our village, and so I could not yet imagine the fabulous attraction every other part of the world might have for Nada. I was ignorant then and safe. She takes me to the Village Gourmet Shop on that day, to buy specialties of Chinese and Malayan and Viennese cooking, wrapped up in trim white packages and never showing a bit of that streaky, watery blood that shows through packages bought at the plebeian supermarkets Nada detested. No blood, nothing. Cleanliness. She takes me along to the library (another library, an innocent library, with a gaudy bulletin board in honor of Halloween, perhaps, announcing on orange posters the “Village Literary Society Will Meet Nov. 5—Discussion: How to Relate to Beatnik Poetry”). A lovely library—how I love libraries, any and all libraries, those sanctuaries for the maimed and undanceable, the lowly, pimply, neurotic, overweight, underweight, myopic, asthmatic … Few are the flirtations in a library, I insist, though Nada never had to search far for an adventure. Few are the assaults, physical or verbal. Libraries exist for people like me.

  And beautiful, heartbreaking, are the chance encounters in a library—that reverent hushed tone, that respectful, resigned seriousness even the most flighty of ladies cannot help—all these are beautiful. For, in front of that very bulletin board a lady in a powder-velvet lavender hat stopped to chat with my Nada, a handsome, ageless woman of forty or so, gloved, nicely shod, friendly. “We would be so very, very honored if you would come to our little meetings sometime,” the lady whispered. She indicated the orange poster. “Of course we're just amateurs but we absolutely love to read. We're just wild about literature. Especially the very latest things. And the oldest things too, I mean the classical things that will never die out. Do you think you might ever come talk to us about your own creative writing? Please think it over, we'd be so grateful! Next month is my turn to present a talk. I'm in charge of the Italian Renaissance and it's such a responsibility. I get so frightened standing in front of a group, but the minute I begin I forget all my nervousness …”

  And Nada takes me merrily along with her to the florist's, where she orders some expensive flowers for a party or something soon due at our house, and the foppish young man behind the counter stares at her with that awed reserve, that grudging admiration, that the effeminate male must acknowledge in the presence of a beautiful woman. I see all this, and more. Such memories come back to me in my sick states, snares of the past, what sorry past I have. And she whisks me off to the next stop, the El Dorado Beauty Salon, where few children are brought and those who are brought spend their sullen time running aimlessly up and down the aisles. Not I, not Richard, good asthmatic Richard, content to sit in a harmless unpadded chair, staring. How lovely the El Dorado Beauty Salon is! (I wonder if it still stands.) Imagine a panoramic confusion of plush pink and fragile gold, of slick plastic evergreens perched high atop plastic pillars. Imagine the sweet, lisping strains of music that seem to be engendered out of the very air itself. Imagine the many ladies moving about, smoking cigarettes, their hair bunched up in dozens of pink rollers, like bobbins. Imagine the forbidden archways, done in gold, with baroque signs above them: Tinting Room. Pedicure Room. Wig Room. Electrolysis Room. A glimpse of more beauty inside, ornate mirrors, black porcelain sinks, stools, couches, big gold ashtrays. Ah, this is the other side of suburbia's public heaven!—the wings, the backstage, the private dressing rooms of the beautiful.

  Richard sits still, alone and hard of breath. A harmless child. No one sees him, no one can guess what violence lies leaden in that tube of a body, that wheezing reed. Eight years old and looking more like six
, behind his thick glasses he sits dutifully and awaits his mother. Back and forth before him stroll ladies of monstrous appearance— some of them dressed in very sheer, flimsy outfits of blue with El Dorado stitched on the collars, the outfits worn for special rinses, tintings, bleachings, and who knows what other rare chemical changes. Atop their heads are masses of plastic cones and cylinders, some of them enormous as tin cans, others small as my little finger, which is fairly small. They stroll about, smoking, chatting, quite content.

  Other ladies, grounded, sit beneath great blowing hair-dryers and smoke and leaf through fashion magazines. A Negro woman of feline suppleness sits before one of the ladies, doing her nails. A cart on two big wheels, like a flower cart, and indeed it is an imitation flower cart, is set before the lady and on it are dozens of jars of fingernail polish and many other items, vaguely surgical in appearance. The Negro woman chatters happily as she does her customer's nails. Pink seems to be the only acceptable color; red is out. Pink nails. Pink toenails. Pink lips. Some ladies wear, wrapped over their profusion of bobbins, a netlike thing of pink, which is tied loosely in back and which gives them the dreamy, exotic look of having been pulled up from the sea, a per-fumy sea that is their true element.

  My Nadia is for the moment behind a screen of slick plastic ferns, in the hands of a Negro woman who washes hair. Three Negro women wash hair behind the ferns. Forever and ever, day after day, they wash hair behind those ferns. Nada is made to sit back, her chair is partially collapsed and her hair drawn down into a black porcelain sink; so strangely passive is she, so wondrously obedient, that it is possible for me to think she is not so unusual a woman: she could be any woman. A blasphemy! Not Nada, but any other woman? Could any other woman have made me what I am? Now the washing is over, Nada's chair is brought back up and she is sitting, making a face, and the good handy Negro woman wraps a white towel around her head. End of the first step.

  I pick up a copy of Vogue with a ripped cover so that Nada will not see me watching her. She stands, she leaves the vale of ferns and crosses to a larger area, all mirrors and gold and waxy fake flowers in big black vases. Women everywhere! Nada passes through them, to a certain chair, a certain man. He is Mr. Stanevicus, a very popular hair stylist, very expensive. Mr. Stanevicus eyes Nada with cool indifference. I have to inch my chair out a little so that I can see everything, though it might break my heart. With Vogue on my meager lap I look up to watch Nada, jealous of Mr. Stanevicus and resentful of his indifference, his flippant razor and his stiff, high-brushed blond hair; she sits, he drapes a white cloth around her, he stands with all his weight on one foot while he questions her about something, then his razor begins, his hands move deftly about her wet humble head, and the danger she is in suddenly terrifies me. Is it possible that Nada might die? Someday die? That her lovely blood might be spilled?

  I open Vogue hastily and find myself staring down upon a photograph of Mrs. Stanislav Proctor, a beautiful woman with hair snipped shorter than mine, slicked back, smoothed to the skull, her eyes fixed up elaborately with thin rims of rhinestones on the eyelids, and eyelashes thick as fern or ivy in a sumptuous garden—heavy, heavy eyelashes, sooty tangles. She stares at me from under these lashes. Decked out in a pilot's outfit of gold and silver, she wears boots that dazzle the eye so that one cannot tell if they are gold or silver or another precious substance; her gloves are nets of silver through which her enormous spiked golden fingernails protrude; in the careless crook of her left arm she carries her pilot's helmet, a large helmet decorated with sequins. Careless also is the unzipped front of her cockpit suit, which shows an alarming dip down into the pale privacy of her bosom. My eight-year-old's eyes sting, lured down into such depths. A caption tells me that she and her cousin, the famous diplomat Hendrick Hundt, have been flying private planes since their childhood and that they hold world records.

  I turn the page and here is another beautiful woman, with shoulder-length wild hair and large sunglasses over her eyes. She is the Duchessa of Vilesia, wife of Silas Hobbit the movie-maker, and she is modeling her custom-made ermine hunting outfit in preparation for an expedition to the Arctic. The lovely Duchessa of Vilesia! Even her knee-length boots are of soft ermine, and her pale, pale skin has the downy look of some magic texture, hardly ordinary skin. Careless in the crook of her arm is a rifle with a powerful scope. Behind her on a wall, slightly out of focus, is an enormous moose's head, stuffed, upon whose nose someone has jauntily stuck a pair of sunglasses that are the exact copy of the Duchessa's—how truly conquered is that beast!

  I look up. A few yards away appears a handsome lady of about fifty. She takes off her fur-trimmed coat and gives it to an attendant, she approaches one of the chairs and is welcomed into it by another male stylist, much like Mr. Stanevicus; a solid lady with thick, shining blond hair and platinum fingernails. But, alas, at once the wig comes off in the young man's hands: out come pins, fixtures, and the wig is rigorously brushed while the lady herself sits pallid and suddenly ugly in her chair, with her own flat, skimpy brown hair reflected back to her in the mirror. She is given the wig and brushes it herself, fondly and vigorously, while her stylist begins to brush her hair, her own hair, and the two of them perform exactly the same motions, their arms moving in exactly the same rhythm, one brushing a wig and the other brushing a head.

  I turn the pages of my magazine. It is all I have, all I've been given. Time passes. An hour passes. Another hour passes, very slowly. My eyes are puffed up from the hairspray in the air, or the smoke, or the perfume, or the swampy female heat that is everywhere about me. At last Nada appears, a new Nada, with her dark hair cut short and shaved on her neck but teased up to a peculiar height and looped down upon her pale forehead in snaky ringlets. My Medusa! I am leaden but her appearance wakes me; I manage to get out of the chair by myself, but I look so feeble that Nada stoops and says, “Are you having an attack?” The finest moments of my life have been those when I was able to tell my mother truthfully that I was not having an attack.

  When we get to the car Nada notices with alarm the packages of food—forgotten all these hours!—and marred now with watery, sticky streaks of blood. In disgust she throws them out. She throws all three packages in a barrel marked FILL ME UP.

  … And so she did exist outside me, I can see her or half-see her, she did exist, she was a quite independent being. Two Nadas existed—the one who was free and who abandoned me often, and the other who has become fixed irreparably in my brain, an embryonic creature of my own making, my extravagant and deranged imagination—and I loved them both, I swear that it was both of them I craved. And so when Nada said to me on that day, “There is nothing personal, never anything personal in freedom,” I understood that the free, restless Nada was asserting herself, and that I could not hold her back. If you leave this time, don't bother to come back…

  26

  Father had flown to South America again on a Wednesday, and when he returned on Saturday Nada was gone. On Friday afternoon I jumped down from the Johns Behemoth school bus (a station wagon without markings) and ran boyishly up our front walk, to show a possibly watching Nada that I was healthy again, and when I opened the front door the foyer smelled of her luggage, a smell I didn't know I knew so well, and there came Ginger shuffling apologetically toward me, rubbing her nose with a wretched, distracted, embarrassed air that told me everything I needed to know.

  I took from her the letter Nada had left me and went with dignity up to my room. I did not cry. I lay on my bed and looked up at the ceiling of this strange house, wondering how I had come here, who I was, to whom I belonged—which harnessed set of adults—but knowing there was a hard, sharp kernel of fire in my stomach that had to be kept from bursting out into flame. And did it burst out? Did it?

  Everywhere else in my body, flooding into my brain and my poor aching eyes, there was a desire for sleep, for heavy, inert, dry-mouthed sleep of the kind drowned men sleep, tossing and turning gently on the ocean floor. So I slept and I did not d
ream. Ginger scratched and snuffled outside the door and finally knocked, but I told her in Nada's precise stagey voice that I was “all right, thank you,” and finally she left, and the day turned into night and I slept, I slept peacefully, and the next day dawned without my noticing, and I woke to hear Father yelling into my face unintelligible nightmare words about some bitch who had run out on us for the third time.

  27

  Thereupon followed a strange idyllic interlude lasting ten days. If Father received any communication from Nada he did not tell me about it. We journeyed about together, he and I, two feckless, energetic bachelors, taking in movies, having dinner out at sunny, friendly restaurants in which children like myself were welcome, going to a “live” wrestling match all the way downtown where the very air about us stank of sweat and silky shorts and cigar smoke and everything fake and honest in its fakery dreamily honest! And we took in late late movies on the television set in Father's room (he and Nada, sad to tell, had not shared a room for several years) and ate potato chips and pickles and other slop together until two in the morning, sleepy, slow, oddly pleased with each other, the way men on a slow, sinking ship must be pleased with the companions fate has doled out to them—who are they to complain,after all? And we went for odd meaningless drives in and around Fern-wood Heights, Father with a cigar stuck in his teeth and his sad, pouched eyes roaming about the late-winter hillsides.

  One evening, coming out of the Fernwood movie house, we encountered Tia Bell and a middle-aged woman who looked like an aunt, and Tia strode over to us and seized Father's hand. “Elwood, is it true?” she said. Father withdrew his hand with dignity—the most dignity I had seen in him—and said he had no idea what she was talking about. But hadn't Natashya … hadn't she … ? Father explained that his wife had gone east to visit relatives, that was all. He stared into Tia's widened, sympathetic eyes and lied with no skill, so abrupt and reckless that Tia must have admired him for it. No doubt she went home and called all of his and Nada's “friends” to praise Father for his stoicism.