Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Mollie and I were kept apart by my grandmother, who now had taken a much harder line toward me, especially after the discovery of the bullet casing which, although it proved nothing to the authorities, she understood as very damning. Citing me as a troubled child, abnormally disturbed after my parents’ deaths, a juvenile delinquent and high school dropout, an unruly young man given to thoughts of violence, potentially psychotic and a danger to her and society, she moved to have me committed to a state hospital for evaluation. I voluntarily agreed to this because, for one, it got me away from her and, second, made it possible for Mollie to visit me, as the facility was a relatively short bus ride away. Third, though I didn’t talk with anyone about it, I felt safer sleeping in an institution designed to keep some people in and other people out, than I ever did back home in my bedroom, knowing that Franklin had somehow managed to escape my attempt to rid the world of him.
When half a year after Franklin’s vanishing a large amount of money was discovered missing from my grandmother’s bank account, it was clear I couldn’t have taken it since I was essentially under observation day and night. The authorities traced a money transfer to a temporary account in Greece. I heard that an international dragnet of cops pursued the thief, but the trail was as cold as the far side of the moon. Mollie, whom I married while still in the hospital once we were both of legal age, tried to use Franklin’s larceny to prove to me that I was mostly right, that Franklin
was
evil, a con man, the opposite of honest, direct,
frank
—but also that he was not some alien.
“Martians don’t need money,” she assured me, with a wistful smile.
I nodded my head in agreement, hoping to mollify Mollie, knowing it was her fondest wish that I might come to my senses and sanity based on this information. Whatever I thought I had done the night of my sixteenth birthday, I had
not
done—this is what the few who cared about me wanted me to understand. The time had come for me to seek a discharge and take my place once more in society. So I renounced as delusional any lingering thoughts I had about Franklin—believe it or not, I never knew his last name; did he even have one?—though I held privately to the hypothesis that he was probably spirited out of the pond in a rescuing spacecraft rather than somehow disappearing that afternoon with numbers to Iris’s savings account, having had enough of us both.
When she died of cancer, not long after my release, Grandmother Iris willed the old house to me, there being no one else left to give it to. In her final years, I think she might have seen the light about who Franklin really was. Oh, I don’t necessarily mean that she ever embraced my theory, which I cling to even now in judicious silence but sure as a spore clings to a moldy loaf of bread. Yet the fact that they never did find his body after so many days of dredging, so many man-hours of frogmen searching Grover’s Mill Pond’s muddy bed, surely must have left her uneasy. I would like to think that if he didn’t really die from the gunshot wounds that night, and if he didn’t drown when I swam his leaden body out into the pond as far as I could before I submerged him, filling his mouth and nostrils with the water meant to weigh him down like liquid concrete, if he did happen to best death a second time, then Iris might have been paid a visit by Franklin. An after-midnight visit to her bedroom, not unlike the one I experienced that time.
And if she did, and he came floating into the scene of her helpless troubled slumber, inhaling, hovering, I’d like to think that maybe she felt a panic of second thoughts about this beast she allowed into our family house off Cranbury Road. I would like to think that if in naked terror in her bed, she reached to her bedside lamp and turned on the light, she might have seen him undisguised, monstrous and gloating, for what he was.
Broken bottles brought him to Mickle Street
and pieces of glass embedded in the mud
to Whitman’s wooden house across the street from
the Church of the Most Unhappy Redeemer for when
it was too quiet he broke another bottle
and he collected his glass in a paper bag
and when he was
verloren
he cut himself
though just as like he cut himself on a wall
while doing an exercise to stretch the tendons
so he could get rid of the numb and burning feeling,
or sometimes he sat on a hydrant and once on a bench
with drooping slats so when the slats gave his back
also gave and feeling came back to his foot
as it came back to Whitman when he sat
on the orange rush seats or rocked in his chair between
the visits and loved the hollyhocks that grew
in the cracks and for a nickel the whole republic
would turn to broken glass as Oscar insisted.
W
hen she is almost seventy, he comes into her life in the fall. It is unusually warm, even in the evening, as she drives her car through the sultry streets toward her spa which is named after a saint. Lately, since she is no longer teaching, she has spent a lot of time there. When she called for an appointment, the receptionist asked her, “Do you prefer a woman or a man?”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” she replied, thinking one pair of hands was like another.
She did not ask the price. She spends money easily. Her husband has provided some from his hard work as a doctor over the years. They have lived hard-working, modest lives, and he has invested conservatively. They bought their rambling Victorian house in Montclair when such places were cheap. Her husband spends little on himself. He does not care for luxury. He mows the lawn, while she weeds the hydrangea bushes by the blue door and cuts back the roses along the fence. He wears his clothes until they are threadbare, spends little on his lunch, and rides the train into the city to work, leaving his elegant car covered in their garage. He has never wanted to travel overseas. She has never been able to have children.
“But I do want you to be happy,” he said this morning, putting his hands on her shoulders, standing on their sunny screened-in porch, where they eat breakfast in the warm weather, safely protected from stinging or biting insects. “After all, we should enjoy the time we have left. We can’t take the money with us when we go. Buy yourself whatever you like.”
So, feeling the pain down her left leg, she decided to try a body massage.
“I’ll give you Gabriel, then. I think you’ll find him excellent,” the receptionist at the spa had said after a moment’s reflection.
She made the appointment for an evening hour. Waiting alone in the empty rooms of her big house for her husband’s return from the city, she often thinks of the lonely lives of the suburban women in the houses all around her. She and her husband had moved out here from the city, because her husband said it would be safer for their future children. The tree- lined streets seemed so empty. She had asked him, “Where are all the people?”
Finding a place to park is another matter. She drives around until she finds a small space near the stone Congregational church and walks from there in the twilight, arriving early. The spa is in a basement without windows, artificially lit. A small pool is illuminated from below, so that the water looks phosphorescent and milky. Many people drift around: hairdressers, manicurists, waiting customers in pink robes.
She is thinking of her mother who died so young when she is brought back to reality by Gabriel’s approach. He comes up quietly, appearing out of nowhere in his soft, crepe-soled shoes and shiny white uniform. He bows his blond head slightly and shakes her hand firmly, with old-world politeness. “Gabriel,” he greets in a mellifluous voice. He looks fresh-skinned, rosy-cheeked, and snub-nosed. Piercingly blue-eyed, he holds himself erect and seems professional. “Follow me,” he says commandingly. She listens to the sound of his shoes as he walks lightly, like a dancer, along the narrow, silent corridor to an elevator. They go up several flights and walk down another dimly lit corridor. He opens the door onto a small, dark room and asks if she has any injuries or areas of the body that need special attention.
She mentions her lower back and left leg where she was once injured skiing and sometimes has pain. He tells her to undress, cover herself with the white sheet, lie flat on her stomach, and place her face in the face cradle. Then he leaves her alone in the shadowy room.
Strange music plays softly—stringed instruments, something being plucked, perhaps even a harp and a cello or violin. Two instruments pass a melody back and forth in counterpoint.
When he comes back into the room, he puts his large hands on her shoulders and presses down gently, running his fingers softly along her spine. Then he folds back the sheet and begins to work on her, using a scented oil. She thinks of the words of Matthew’s Gospel about the three kings from the East bringing frankincense, myrrh, and was it gold?
“How’s the pressure?” he asks.
“Perfect,” she murmurs.
He has a pleasantly light but efficient touch, and he remains silent. She wonders what he might be thinking, and why he, an unusually handsome man, has chosen this profession, working on one body after the next, the young and the old, the fat and the thin, the black and the white. Perhaps they all seem identical to him, these bodies he touches so intimately. Then she dozes off a little and loses herself for a moment. When he tells her, in his soft voice, to turn over, lifting the sheet so that she can do so without exposing her body, she is surprised that the time has gone by so quickly. He massages her sore leg carefully and says, “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you have the body of a young woman. I see a lot of fat young ones these days.”
She smiles and responds, “You have healing hands.” Before she leaves the room, feeling light, almost floating, the pain gone, she gives him a good tip and tells him she will return the next week.
“Come up directly. Now you know the way,” he says.
She goes back regularly, once or sometimes twice a week, making her appointments directly with him, always in the evening which she finds too long. She goes along the narrow corridor, up the elevator, and down the next one, into the small room. Lying in the dark her mind wanders freely, and she thinks how strange it is that she lives these two lives, the one with her husband filled with conventional truths, and this other, imaginary one, in the secret room, where she explores hidden feelings.
The massages seem to be having a good effect. As she steps lightly in her tight, white trousers and pale, fitted jackets, through the long, wide aisles of the fine supermarket where she shops, with its fresh fruit and vegetables and bright flowers, people come up to tell her she is beautiful, almost as though she trails the seductive odor of the massage oil which she keeps on her body, not showering sometimes for days. Men whisper words to her on the train, words she does not quite catch and has to have repeated embarrassingly. A red-faced gentleman who sits beside her repeats, “I said, nice legs!” Once a young black man says, “You look terrific!” and tells her she should write down her secrets in a book.
“I did,” she replies. She has written a memoir, though without secrets of that kind.
Instead of having her straight hair dyed blond and cut short, she now has the courage to let it turn white and grow long, down her back. Her husband encourages her: “Let it go white! Don’t cut it!” Uncolored, her hair falls in soft, white curls. She likes to put her fingers into it and flip it back from her face luxuriously.
Women whisper shyly to her in the ladies’ room. “Oh! I love your hair!” or “What color was it? I hope mine goes light like that.” Once, when she asks for a senior ticket at the station, the young woman says admiringly, “I do hope I look like you when I’m a senior.”
Even her nails, which she has always bitten nervously down to the quick, grow long. She keeps them clean and white-tipped, thinking of the young Madame Bovary.
She thinks of the things that go on growing in the dark of the coffin: the nails and the hair. She wonders if it is because she spends so much time in that secret room, in the muffled light, her face in the cradle, her eyes closed, her mind elsewhere, that her hair and her nails grow so luxuriantly, that her skin seems so smooth. Is it possible that age—that universally ugly thing—can appear beautiful, that she has been left unscathed, eternal?
She was pretty as a girl with a good figure, and attractive as a young woman, but never before have people accosted her thus in the street or come up to her when she goes swimming. Her husband is not the sort to pay much attention to her looks or give compliments. He loves her blindly, whether she looks old or young. Besides, he is still a busy man, refusing to retire, leaving early in the morning and coming back late at night, caring for the sick and the suffering. He is concerned with the state of the world, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the erosion of the earth. He refused to turn on the air-conditioning in their sunny house during the sultry fall weather. Now, in winter, he opens the curtains to take advantage of the greenhouse effect and consume less heating oil. He turns off lights, avoids the dishwasher.
At first, she supposes it is because she is old that people feel free to say these things to her with impunity. Then she forgets to look into the mirror at the wrinkles, the brown spots, the blue veins in her legs, and the sag of her skin.
She spends much of her day keeping fit. She jogs regularly and takes up yoga. She practices all the difficult poses: the wheel, the splits, the bind, the headstand. She stands on one leg, like a tree, head held high, arms raised to the sky. She looks around with secret satisfaction at the younger, heavier participants who strain, sweat, and topple. She consumes only fruit, vegetables, and nuts, and so loses weight. Sometimes a voice records her actions as though she were writing the story of her life in her head.