Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Now she turns her head, aware that someone is following her in the deserted street. She hears the familiar squelch of the crepesoled shoes and smells the secret odor of the oil in the evening air. She says the name aloud: “Wunderlich.” She wants to run, but in her high-heeled shoes and tight skirt, her heart beating hard, as in a dream, she cannot advance. She glances nervously over her shoulder into the shadows of the solitary street. She must get to her car.
But when she looks back, she sees no one. All she can hear is the sound of her own words, recording her life, the end of her story, and the crepe-soled shoes, echoing in her mind.
S
he sat up in bed, rigid but strangely alert, as if trying to identify the sound of something underwater. When he touched her shoulder to try to make her lie down again, she turned toward the wall.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
She shook her head back and forth.
“Rina, come on, what is it? You’re scaring me.”
“I don’t feel good.”
“Take a hit of that joint I made for you on the bureau. It’ll help.”
“How long we gonna go on like this, huh? What’s your plan, Stacy? Is there one?”
“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“Course you don’t understand,” she said, finally facing him. “Things going along pretty much the way you want? Just stay high every minute with me in this tomb under the ground, that’s below sea level, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’m not high every minute.” He wanted to add that his place wasn’t below sea level either but he wasn’t 100 percent sure if it was or not.
“C’mon, can you face reality just a little? You wake up and have a Quaalude so you can take a shower. To counteract that you smoke a joint so you can have sex with me in the morning. Then to get through the day you take more Quaalude or sometimes E. Then it’s back to pot so we can watch TV and go to sleep. What do you think, you’re gonna die if you aren’t high for a minute?”
“Okay. We’ll cut back a little. I’ll cut back.”
“It’s not just the drugs.”
“What?”
“We never go anywhere. We never do anything.”
“What’re you saying? We go out.”
“Sure. We make heroic little runs for food to the deli or sometimes we even make it to the supermarket. We have to get high to do that too. And then, of course, we go out so you can get more drugs. How come we never go to New York anymore?”
He felt a surge of anger but told himself to stay cool. He’d seen her like this before and knew that if he just stayed cool things would eventually get better.
“I thought we agreed we’d had enough of New York,” he said, turning his head away, hoping to see a bit of a tree trunk perhaps, but the blinds were shut.
“I meant living there, I’d had enough. I didn’t mean never visiting. I’m sick of these dealers and crack whores you go to all the time.”
“It was one guy and his girlfriend. You’re exaggerating.”
“I’m sick of all the other Fort Lee zombies too. I’m too young to live like this, to just give up.”
He was scared now. Something in her tone of voice and in her eyes frightened him. “I didn’t think we were giving up,” he said softly. “I thought we were just taking a little break, like a kind of vacation.”
“This ain’t a vacation. We’re just dying is what it is.”
“Come on, you don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it. We have to get high to go to the bathroom and nobody’s washed a dish in a week.”
He felt himself start to vibrate then. He didn’t know if it was from the pot, his Viagra, or if it were somehow cold in his apartment (though it was close to the end of June), or maybe it was just the impact her words and tone of voice had on him as if they robbed him of his sense of warmth.
“Okay, you tell me what you want me to do,” he finally said.
“Jesus Christ!” She looked at the little clock on the bed table. “It’s almost three in the afternoon. My sleep patterns are completely destroyed.” She put her hands over her eyes as if she were going to cry but then got out of bed decisively. “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to take a shower and then I’m going to get some food for us, and while I’m gone you think about what we’re gonna do.”
“You worried about money? Is that it?” he said sharply. It was odd to talk to her that way when she was standing in front of him completely naked. She turned to face him again and he tried to stay focused on her face though he didn’t want to see the look in her eyes.
“Yah, okay, I admit I’m a little concerned about what you’re gonna do when your parents’ money runs out,” she said. “You haven’t even tried to get a job since you quit your last one.”
He sighed, then stopped himself abruptly. Sighing was definitely the wrong route to take with Rina. Instead he told her that he wasn’t going to start dealing, if that’s what she was worried about, that he’d just done it for a little while years ago. He checked her reaction but it wasn’t what he’d hoped for. She was slowly shaking her head back and forth again.
“We’re setting ourselves up to get in a lot of trouble,” Rina said. “Your landlady gave me a funny look yesterday.”
“A funny look? Big deal.”
“A killer look that said,
Bitch, I’d just as soon off you as not
. I feel like any day she could call the cops on us.”
“She won’t do anything. She wants her money too. Who else would take her bottom floor and pay what I do?”
“You sure about that? I think it’s time to go someplace else for a while is what I think. But you think about it while I’m out. You focus on it without getting high first, if you can, and when I come back you tell me what you came up with, okay?”
* * *
She had to know how he’d feel, didn’t she? Hadn’t he jumped out of bed right after she said it and volunteered to go shopping with her? But she insisted she wanted to go alone so he could think, in other words, worry. That was Rina in a nutshell—
Runaway Rina
he’d nicknamed her in his mind a long time ago—who’d run away from home as a teenager, and never came back first from Vineland to Atlantic City, then from A.C. to San Francisco, and finally from New York with him to Fort Lee. Come to think of it, his own mother would sometimes leave or threaten to leave him and his father too, whenever she wanted to get back at them for some perceived deficiency or slight, of which the world had no end, of course—so why take the lackings of the world out on your family? The vibrating was getting worse and he was feeling more and more cold. He pulled the blankets up on his shoulders and tried to get warm.
He thought of something else then. A woman who looked like Rina could do anything and might well be doing it right now with anybody. He pictured her breasts—smallish but with oversized nipples, when they erected. He’d never seen nipples like that before, and knew he never would again. They were once-in-a-lifetime nipples—he was only thirty-four but he already knew that. The first time he saw them erect he’d nearly come just from looking at them. How could she have done him the way she did just a few hours ago and then gotten angry enough that she’d leave him like this? There was no logic with Rina, ever, so he could never relax with her. The slightest thing could upset her and then he’d worry that she’d leave him or else screw someone else, which amounted to the same thing.
He got out of bed and took a Quaalude from the bureau. What would his father have done in this situation? He’d been with his own Rina all those years. Of course it was absurd to compare himself to his father who was so much more mature and honest and who barely even drank, much less took any drugs. His father was emotionally strong all right, in a way he never could be. He’d stayed over forty years with Stacy’s mother—a woman he should have left but didn’t. What hadn’t he endured? The death of his parents, his brothers and sister. Career frustration, raising two difficult children, especially him. But never drank, never really complained, even after his stroke from which he finally passed. He always tried to help everyone, particularly his hypochondriacal wife. Never cheated either and even quit smoking on his own at the age of sixty-two.
His father was physically strong too. Once during a family vacation in Atlantic City when he was only seven or eight, he went in the ocean holding his father’s hand because the waves were big, enormous to his child’s eye and stronger than any water he’d ever felt. It was a little scary because he couldn’t really swim much then and when the waves came they’d crash over his head and knock him down. But his father never stopped holding his hand. He could feel his hand underwater as if it were stronger than the surf, then feel and see it again when he emerged from below. He remembered laughing, squealing with delight, and his father laughing too, only letting go of his hand when they reached the sand in front of the boardwalk.
How exciting yet strangely innocent the boardwalk was then! Little kids ran freely up and down it laughing and yelling and carrying their cotton candy like magic wands. There was a funhouse then, around where the Taj Mahal was now, and horses still dove into the ocean from the old steel pier. One time his family went to the Miss America pageant and he picked the winner, young as he was, Miss Ohio, which made his mother marvel at him. Still, what he remembered most was jumping the waves with his father, holding his hand firmly as they crashed over him.
But this was becoming too painful to think about. What was the point of getting things you loved if you could never get them back again, if you could only lose them, as if life was nothing but an extended game of hide-and-seek? And now Rina was playing another form of hide-and-seek with him.
He decided not to wait for the Quaalude to hit and began smoking the joint he’d left for her on the bureau. It was the right decision, he said to himself, as he finally lay back under the blankets.
When she walked into the tiny kitchen carrying the groceries he was still lying down pretending not to be high. She began putting the food away quickly and didn’t answer him when he said hello.
“So did you do some thinking?” she finally said, coming into the room at last.
“Yah, I did.”
She stood in front of him dressed in her tight blue jeans, staring at him, waiting.
“How’d you like to go to Atlantic City?” he said.
They were driving at least five miles under the speed limit so they wouldn’t risk being stopped (not trusting the landlady, they’d decided to bring their whole stash with them) when he sensed something, a kind of tense quiet that permeated the closed-in space of the car. For a minute he debated whether to ask her what it was—always a dangerous question these days. If only she’d followed his advice and taken a hit before they left or at least had a Xanax, but she was stubborn that way. She was trying to set an example. He turned on a rock radio station he thought she’d like (he would have preferred jazz or classical), but her mood didn’t change. That was her method when she wanted to talk about something—to just disappear into a cone of silence until he couldn’t take it anymore.
“You’re being pretty quiet,” he said, deciding to play it halfway.
“I’m just wondering about things.”
“What things?”
“I’m wondering why Atlantic City? Why exactly are we going there?”
“I thought you liked to go swimming, you always did before.”
“I do like swimming but there are plenty of other places we could go on the shore where we could swim.”
“It’s the same ocean, isn’t it? And Atlantic City has the boardwalk.”
“So you think we have the money to stay in a hotel there?”
“I told you not to worry about money, baby. We can afford to stay there for at least a few nights.”
“And I guess you don’t plan to do much gambling then?”
“Not if you don’t want me to,” he said, silently congratulating himself, not only on his answer, but because he thought he really meant it. “So have I answered all your questions?”
“Some of them.”
“Only some of them?”
“I have issues with Atlantic City too, you know.”
Then he remembered that she used to work as a dancer there (before they met in New York), and she might have done some hooking too. He’d never asked her too much about that. Atlantic City was also where she went first when she ran away; he could understand her mixed feelings.
“So what do you want? You want to forget all about it and just turn around?”
“I don’t see why we can’t go to a quieter place to swim and cool out and be together. Some place like Ventnor or Longport, that’s less tempting.”
“What do you mean
tempting
? What would you be tempted to do?” he said, thinking of her dance routine again.
“
I’m
not tempted to do anything there. I was thinking of you.”
“Me? Why me?”
“I don’t know. I can’t help thinking you’re planning a meeting with some big-shot dealer there. I’m afraid you’ll be tempted to make some kind of score.”
He felt his heart beat but kept his cool. Could she somehow know about Ike? Ike had really seemed to care about him, especially after his father died, giving him some prime territory to deal in. A few months ago, in fact, he heard that lke had moved to Ventnor for a little peace and quiet. This was too good to be true, yet it was true. He could visit him in Ventnor and Rina couldn’t possibly object to that. He wouldn’t have to set foot in Atlantic City except to visit the beach where he’d swam with his father. He could meet Ike in a clean, family-oriented place where he could even bring Rina.
“Okay, we can stay in Ventnor,” he said. “That’s cool.”
She took his hand which in itself made it all worth it. “Thanks, sweetie,” she said smiling.
“I like you, Stacy, you’re a good kid. Whenever you’re in Atlantic City you look me up and I’ll take care of you. You look me up and I’ll
set
you up, deal?”
That’s what Ike had said to him the last time he saw him, a few years ago in Harrah’s. There was always work from Ike and good money too. Sometimes he even gave him a girl and he’d get a free blow job as a tip. Ike was a first-class guy all around. He only dealt with the best people: first-rate dealers, hookers, and clients—all top of the line. Even when he’d moved to New York and started getting out of the business a little, Ike still kept in touch.