Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And life without Nada was a surprise, because it was so much like life with Nada. We discovered that she hadn't been around the house that much. It was good to discover that! “What do we care, huh? What the hell,” Father would say in a brave, gruff voice to me as we raided the refrigerator at midnight. We ate like pigs. Father gained weight and patted his stomach, saying to what few people stopped in around five for drinks, mostly businessmen on their way through the city, “Really putting it on, aren't I?” And he'd pat himself as if patting a dog.

  With Nada went our old maid Ginger, for reasons I did not understand, and now we had a nice white, middle-aged lady with a kindly brow, and she lived in the maid's room above the kitchen, whereas Ginger had always been a nuisance: someone always had to drive her down to the bus stop, where she boarded a bus for a nine-mile ride down into the city, and out of Fernwood, Bornwell Pass, Pleasure Dells, and Oak Woods.

  The first time I saw Florence a strange thing occurred. In pulling off her black, lint-specked gloves she made the same gesture that Father had made when he showed me his product, that strand of wire. Father had held the wire stretched between his hands, as if presenting something sacred to me, and Florence had pulled off one glove by tugging at the tips of the fingers, and as she said something to me—”Real cold for April, eh?”—she paused and the glove remained where it was, half on and half off, the middle finger stretched out grotesquely.

  I was out of school for two weeks. It took about two weeks to arrange for a transfer to Fernwood Junior High (where, incidentally, I never ended up), and anyway Father thought it was a good idea for me to “rest.” So I lay around the big house, staring outside. The lawn was greening up. When Florence came in the room I left, not wanting to be pitied. Florence was always vacuuming and polishing and running water furiously. There was a soapy, steelwoolish, pitying odor about her, just as there had been an odor of something confused and fragrant and dark about Nada. But I really didn't think about Nada, I want you to know. I didn't think much about the way I had failed her, about being such a mess, a failure at eleven, but instead I just lay around and listened to my heart beat, wondering if it might stop someday soon and not caring much. I rested. I lost weight.

  There was one room in the house we didn't “bother with,” and that was Nada's. Florence did not go into it with her vacuuming apparatus and rags and polish, nor did she allude to it once Father told her not to “bother with” it. She nodded and understood, as if all houses had one special nasty room.

  I remembered Nada's room from the day Mr. Hansom had taken us through. That had been the best room on the second floor, with a lovely bay window looking out onto the sunny side yard with its fringe of evergreens so that it seemed as if you were balanced atop a magic forest—that magic, sinister room where Nada made noises on her typewriter and spent her secret hours away from us. Sometimes when Father was gone I walked back and forth past the door to that room, that Room, that room, thinking: What would happen if I went inside?

  And one day I did.

  It was still a nice room but very messy, as you might expect. You knew something was odd about the person who'd lived here just by the way books were strewn around, lying flat on the rumpled bed, opened and helpless on their backs in the dust on the floor. Not very many books, just scattered messily. Her desk had been pulled over to the bay window, by Nada herself evidently, for the green carpet had four sharp streaks in it made by the desk's legs. The desk had been cleared off. The typewriter was gone. Everything was gone. A cheap aluminum desk lamp had fallen onto the floor and lay there exposing its bulb to me. I picked it up and put it back on the desk.

  Nada's work had always been forbidden. I would as soon have hidden in her shower and surprised her there as read her stories and books—and she had no more told me not to do the one than she had told me not to do the other. I knew! I was sensitive and intelligent, that sort of kid. But now all that was over, and I rummaged through her drawers—pencils were always darting out toward me, rolling noisily— and decided that I would see what the secret was. There were drawers of scrap paper and some yellowing manuscripts, but when I began to read them I felt dizzy and a little nauseated, so I put them back for another day. I had to go slowly. Sweating, absurd, I opened a notebook at random and stared at the lazily scrawled entries:

  1. Look up antique shop B mentioned.

  2. Inside of car cleaned—tell them about chocolate R spilled.

  Was “R” me? Was I just “R” to her? Or was that a sign of affection? I read on:

  NB NB NB Must read Hegel sometime.

  I too must read Hegel sometime; yes. And on, flipping through the sacred book with its pretty blue lines faint like veins running down the page, and one wider, prettier red one at the top, like an artery:

  Idea for a story: honeymoon couple pick up hitchhiker; ordinary talk, to the horrible, back to the ordinary again; they let him off; they drive away.

  That didn't sound like much of a story to me.

  Revise “Death and the Maiden” and change title.

  I wonder, did she do that? Did she revise it and did she change the title? Her simple loops and i's and slash-crossed fs and the agreeable slant of her writing pleased me. I could imagine her sitting up here, flooded with winter light, her hair shining and smoky and her face intent, absorbed in her writing, which took her so far beyond Father and me:

  There must be a thread of story somewhere but where? the climax will be the death of X, but one must get past. The trouble is getting there … and getting past. As in any first-person narrative there can be a lot of freedom. Certain central events—what the hell can they be?—leading up to the death.

  “comic nihilism”

  senseless manic behavior in some natural setting … woods, flower bed. mysterious meetings, parallels …

  Nada was coming back to me slowly. I began to feel her in the room. I could smell her cigarette smoke and hear her restlessness. My heart pounded as I read:

  Idea for a short novel: the young man (like J?) leads two lives, one public and the other secret, buys a gun. frightens people, doesn't hurt them. I can stretch this out to three episodes but no more, fine … then the fourth, when you've been conditioned to the others, results in the murder: planned all along though maybe he didn't know it. (Too corny? Should he know it, or not?) The sniper. “The Sniper.” I'll think of a theme later.

  I read this over several times, bent over her desk, surreptitious and impatient in her sacred room. My heart began to pound as if it knew something already that I myself did not know.

  2

  Had I been a musician, I could have devised some moody thunder-haunted background for my tale; even though it would have turned out funny, there would have been a spiteful dignity to it. Had I been a painter, my patient friends, I would have devised a mural vast as my imagination, called “The Abortion That Failed,” and we would see a deep, dark pool that is sleep or night or death, and Nada's long smoky hair drifting back into the darkness or drifting out from it (you may take your choice), and her face pale as it never was in life, her lips dreamy and parted upon a hesitant smile, her eyes vague, dark, lovely. Off to each side there would be the troops of well-wishers that attend every birth. Bebe, Minnie, Mimi, whatever their ludicrous names were—I am starting to forget—and men like Father and Dean Nash and Mr. Spoon, men who are never naked but even in the presence of a Birth have their ties knotted up tight against their throats. And everywhere the lushness and tranquillity of Fernwood, approached by great expanses of highways, expressways, winding, soaring, veering roads that seem impatient with the earth, mountains of junked cars, beer cans, and broken glass. In the mist a half-formed, embryonic child's face, just the barest suggestion of a face, of a soul…

  3

  The next day the door of Nada's room was fixed with an expensive brass lock, and Father spoke to me in a modification of his man-to-man talk. This talk was comradely but shifty-eyed; I preferred it to the other talk.

  “We've g
ot to stick together, the two of us,” he declared. For some reason we hadn't had dinner yet and it was getting late, past seven-thirty He said, patting my back, “Two bachelors rambling around together, they've got to keep everything out in the open. No secrets, see? We made a deal that that certain somebody wasn't going to have any power in this house anymore. Right?”

  He was gentle enough with me, but I felt that his restless fingers might get out of control.

  “Do you want her to die?” I said.

  “What, Dickie? What?”

  “Do you want her to die?”

  He stared at me. “Now what the hell kind of talk is that, Buster? Look, now. Forget it. Absolutely forget it. You never said it and I never heard it. Any kind of morbid unnatural thoughts like that.” He began shaking his large head. “Look, absolutely forget it. I mean, put it out of your mind. Neither of us heard that.”

  “I only meant—”

  “No. Forget it.” He was shaking his head with his eyes closed. “It's that morbid, unnatural atmosphere of Johns Behemoth. When you start public school you'll get in with some real normal kids, and you can play football or something. Right? I think, yes, I think maybe that everything that happened happened for the good. I think maybe it did, when you look at it from a long-range view. Right, Buster?”

  He had to fly to New York for a few days, so I spent my free time— free time!—down at the library, trying to look up Nada's writing. I know now that none of us ever has any free time, it's all being dearly paid for. But then I didn't know it; I was exhilarated by being “free,” not just from Father but from Nada, because when I was engrossed in reading her stories I was freed from her as a person. My mother. I could sit in the comfortable, sleep-inducing leather chairs ranged around the empty fireplace at the library and read the stories of this strange, delicate woman and not have to think that I had come out of her body, uninvited. Around me clip-clopped Fernwood ladies in their expensive high heels, and a dreamy halo of perfume rose from each of them. They were people in a dream no matter how thunderous the sound of their shoes! Occasionally two stopped to chat, rather loudly, and I could almost see their halos of perfume move together and overlap. They were all handsome, handsome women. I wonder what tiny lives and deaths have taken place in their bodies. Most of them were slim women, you know that. In other areas you might see fat flabby women, with upper arms that jiggle, but in Fernwood everyone is healthy, tanned from Jamaica and Bermuda, and restrained and slim, and if their upper arms do jiggle, you can be sure that their sleeves are always decorously long.

  Bèebèe Hofstadter came in, handsomer than the others, in an expensive light green suit and alligator purse and shoes. Her hair was newly tinted; she looked as if she herself had just been set upon the street by the hands of Monsieur Janet down the block. She selected from the Browse & Leaf shelf a brightly jacketed book entitled The Care and Feeding of the Middle-Aged American Male. Then she turned, and before I could raise my book she saw me.

  “Richard Everett,” she whispered. She had identified me. She clip-clopped to me like a nurse, smiling. The halo of her perfume moved along with her, though jerkily and folded me in it. She talked. Never once did she speak of Nada, as if Nada were dead, and her words flowed along with brightness and concern, mentioning the names of people I should have known, mentioning a sensational news event elaborated upon daily in the papers—”Isn't it just a shame? A shame”— and something about football. This kind, lovely woman, as nice as she could be to one so miserable, but of course her kindness meant nothing. By now you see that: all of Fernwood is kind, nice, generous, lovely, and it means nothing, nothing.

  It turned out (her main point) that her husband was back from Japan, and he was going to take Gustave and a lovely girl cousin of Gustave's to a concert the next night, and would I like to join them? Her face was flushed with charity. I told her politely that, yes, yes, I would be very happy to join them. No one had been so good to me for a while, and there was an awful, shaky moment when I almost cried, but it passed. She began to talk again. Behind her, passing from the Browse & Leaf shelf to the more demanding Fireplace Reading shelf, was a woman in a silvery, shiny coat. Her back, alas, was rather broad for Fernwood, and the tug of her shoulders on the material made its shiny weave catch the overhead light. I was put suddenly in mind of the silver balloon in the sky on that day when Nada and I were headed for the zoo.

  “Richard, are you all right?” Mrs. Hofstadter said.

  “I'm sorry—yes.”

  “Are those your teeth chattering like that?”

  “No. Yes, I've got a cold,” I said wildly. My teeth bit at each other and settled in rigidly. They were not going to get loose and chatter again.

  I walked all the way home from the library. It was chilly for April,and I thought peacefully that I would catch a real cold, catch flu, catch pneumonia. The inertia of my body was already a kind of sickness, but a pleasant one. You don't think sickness is pleasant? Try it! Lovely to lie there in sunny-smelling white sheets, legs and arms resting as if the blood in them has at last come to a stop—you don't need anyone then. Only you healthy people need friends. You're always running around, making telephone calls; you have so much energy. But we sick people have no energy at all. We are freed from it. We don't need anyone, our bodies keep us company enough, thank you. We think about dying and how pleasant that might very well be, getting rid not only of everyone once and for all but getting rid of the desire to get rid of them and the desire for any kind of desire at all. As I walked home I felt how pleasant it was to be “free,” to be completely alone and to know it. Father was in New York and Nada was … Nada was also in New York, but of course it couldn't be the same New York. Nada and Father would never meet, not even by accident. Seeing the two of them together, you knew that they could never have met, by accident or any other way, they could never have exchanged two words, never have married. Anyone could see that!

  It was a lovely long walk. These spring days in Fernwood! Everything, everything, is lovely in Fernwood! To tell you of all the sloping lawns, evergreen screens (planted at full growth), greening gardens, courtyards, oval driveways, to tell you of the luxurious pleasures of their box-shaped houses, their fishponds, the glimpses of their colored maids at windows, washing windows that are already clean—ah, to tell you of these things would be to write another Paradiso, and we writers are better equipped to write of the Inferno and Purgatory, as you know. Before the rare beauties of the wealth of America a writer can do nothing—his “criticisms” are just envy and everyone knows it. But what can he do? Little orchards, little cars, gray-white statues back in courtyards, half glimpsed, and gray-tweeded businessmen hopping out the side doors, faces flushed with happiness and close antiseptic electric shaves, lawn crews wheeling expensive mowers from their trucks down planks to the streets, and painters rubbing their noses happily as they examine that three-story box that will cost the owner $3,000 to have painted—what can I say? What can I do besides present these things to you?

  Why, you wouldn't venture into a Fernwood home without knowing beforehand that the mud rug you should not—should not!—wipe your feet on is a three-by-five $600 Aubusson, matching the living-room rug, and you wouldn't venture in without already knowing the rare fine smell of good wood and good wood polish that will greet you, and an odor of expensive roasted cashews set out in antique silver trays—just for you! And you wouldn't peek into the “music room” without knowing beforehand that the great grand piano does not mean anyone in the house “plays”; it is there because it is there, solid and polished. It is a world of property lines, surveyor's papers, title deeds, abstracts, histories, and pedigrees, and in these mansions people do— do what? Do they live? Live?

  What does that mean, to live?

  If God remakes Paradise it will be in the image of Fernwood, for Fernwood is Paradise constructed to answer all desires before they are even felt. Heaven and earth converge like two friendly halos of perfume, overlapping, sinuous, and the crysta
l chandeliers and elegant automobiles are there to please you, just to please your eye, and there is never any contrast between what is said and what is done, what is done and what is intended, what is intended and what is desired— everything runs together. And these people are not even rich, don't misunderstand me. They would blush to be called “rich” and stammer defenses. This is a story of the middle class: you see, the men worked.

  And if it occurs to you, my clever reader, that there is irony intended here—that Richard Everett, miserable slob as he is, is being cute and praising Fernwood while (beneath it all) he despises Fernwood—you are wrong. Wrong. Fernwood is an angel's breath from heaven. It is as real as any dream, more real than a nightmare, terribly real, heavily real, as real as our neighbor's lovely Borzoi dog leaping onto your chest or Nada's grand piano sliding onto your toe. Fernwood is Paradise and it is real! I will go to my death believing this, that man has done no better than Fernwood, that God Himself has done no better, that no other society, no other world, is quite equal to it. And if it turns out that there is someone leaning over my shoulder as I write this, some muse, some evil genius who is perhaps my mother—just perhaps—then you are not to assume that this evil genius is “using” me as an ingenu-narrator, no, you are not. No irony.

  And what has all this to do with my pleasant feelings about sickness, and my “freedom”? You must remember that everything runs together in an autobiography. It is only in fiction that there are clear transitions between events.

  When I turned up our walk, panting up our hill, a man sitting in a creme-de-menthe-colored car at the curb jumped out. “Richard Everett?” he said. He hurried up to me. Six feet two, briefcase-carrying, a rapid, competent smile, keen eyes; he shook hands with me and introduced himself. He took out a notebook. “I would appreciate it very much if you'd answer a few questions for me. Nothing extraordinary,” he said. “The subject under question today is Charles Spoon, who is applying for maximum security clearance. Mr. Everett, how well do you know Mr. Spoon?”