Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
1
T
hey were married.
A hasty marriage, in late July of 1950.
“No time for an engagement. Dirk and I don’t believe in such bourgeois customs.”
Ariah spoke breathlessly, biting her lip to keep from laughing.
And, as Dirk Burnaby said, more somberly, “When it’s love at first sight, you may as well give in. You’re doomed.”
Doomed to happiness! So the lovers believed.
They were married, to the astonishment of everyone who knew them.
Especially those relatives, friends, acquaintances of the Littrells of Troy, New York. “Of course, no one approves,” Ariah said, “but we’ve decided not to care.” She wanted to say
we’ve decided not to give a damn
but held her tongue.
Being in love with Dirk Burnaby, being so happy in love, Ariah had 116 W
Joyce Carol Oates
to bite her tongue often for fear of speaking intemperately. For fear of speaking brashly. For fear of speaking truthfully.
In her thirtieth year Ariah had discovered not just love, but sex.
Not just sex, but sex with Dirk Burnaby.
Lovemaking
it was called.
Making love
. Oh, aptly named! It could inspire you to speak bluntly, to shock and offend. It could inspire you to say things you’d never dreamt of saying before, when you’d made the effort (well, most of the time you’d tried to make the effort) to be decorous, well-behaved, a minister’s daughter, a “lady.”
Dirk said, “We can’t care that others disapprove. Your family, my mother.” He paused, suddenly staring with too much interest at a spot on the floor. For he was thinking of
the other
. The
first husband
.
The
Erskines
. “No. We can’t care, and we don’t. We’re married, and that’s that.”
Ariah said, “No. That is
this
.”
Touching her husband in that way of hers. The “secret tickle”
she’d about perfected. His gaze, meant to appear stern, serious, swam with sudden desire.
They were married, and Ariah laughed: “We can do this all the time, can we? My goodness.”
“
My
goodness, you mean.”
Tickling her in that secret way of his, that made her pant, scream, beg for mercy as she’d never done, or imagined, as the minister’s daughter in Troy, New York.
They were married, and lived in Niagara Falls in the brownstone townhouse in Luna Park. There, they made love all the time. Or nearly.
He would leave her one day, she knew. But she never thought of it, so happy.
Do not think of it. Do not be morbid-minded
.
So Ariah instructed herself. She meant to be, in this miracle-marriage, a practical down-to-earth woman.
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She meant to be a loving woman, uninhibited. Every evening at dinner there was wine, poured by Dirk into sparkling crystal glasses.
That wicked, lovely sensation. Coursing through Ariah like molten honey. “I love love love
you
.” Sometimes, laughing, he’d lift her in his arms, fling her over his shoulder, carry her upstairs.
She wasn’t pregnant yet. Or, maybe she was?
Do not be morbid-minded, Ariah!
Often she took the bottle of wine upstairs with them. Especially the Chianti. As long as it was open, and hadn’t been entirely finished, you wouldn’t want it to go sour.
They were married, and never looked back.
That jiggly-creaking brass bed on the top, third floor of the house at 7 Luna Park! In the French silk-wallpapered bachelor bedroom with the deep-piled mint-green Chinese carpet so delicious to sink your bare toes into. In the neo-Georgian townhouse less than a half-mile from the Niagara Gorge. In the house where, summer nights with opened windows, moths throwing themselves against the window screens like soft palpitating thoughts, they could hear, in the distance, the ceaseless murmur of The Falls.
They were married, and became young.
Younger than either recalled having been as a child.
“I grew up in ‘Shalott.’ ”
“
I
grew up in the rectory.”
“We were privileged, we had money.”
“
We
were privileged, we had God.”
They laughed, shivered, and held each other close. They were naked as eels. So many toes (twenty!) beneath the covers at the foot of the bed.
Neither wished to think how accidental it was, they’d met, and fallen in love, and married.
Neither wished to speculate how bereft their lives would be, if
the
other
husband hadn’t thrown himself into the Horseshoe Falls.
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No
.
You will not be morbid-minded ever again
.
They were married, and each became the other’s best friend.
And each realized he hadn’t had a true best friend, until now.
They were married. Dirk Burnaby’s legendary insomnia disappeared.
Though he was a big man, and with Ariah’s delicious home cooking he’d be getting bigger, yet Dirk discovered in himself a knack for snuggling in the bony curve of his wife’s side; a knack for burrowing, and burying his face in her neck; a knack for drifting to sleep in utter contentment, not a thought (of his profession, his finances, his increasingly eccentric mother) to plague him. Oh, life was so simple.
Life was this.
Ariah remained awake, cradling him in her arms. She wanted to stay awake, to luxuriate in him. To gloat over him. Her husband! Her man! He was quite the most wonderful man she’d ever met, let alone come to know. Let alone touched, and kissed. He was quite the most wonderful man any girl might have dreamt of, in Troy, New York. She saw how women glanced after him in the street. She might be jealous one day, but not yet.
Tenderly she stroked his shoulders, his forehead, the stubbly underside of his jaw. She loved it that Dirk Burnaby was a big man, that he took up so much space in her life. She was baffled to recall what her life had been before him.
It wasn’t a life. It hadn’t yet begun.
She stroked his hair, brushing it out of his eyes. His fair flaxen hair, thick and springy and not a gray hair in it she could discover. Sometimes she felt a pang of envy. For her own so-called red hair was fading fast.
Invaded by gray, silver, even white hairs. You could tell (you could speculate) she’d had a shock of some kind. A girl’s face but streaked-gray hair. Soon, she’d look like a banshee. But she was too vain to dye her hair. (Maybe she wasn’t vain enough?)
Dirk slept, and in his sleep seemed to grow heavier. He breathed
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through his mouth, a wet whistling sound. She loved that sound. She kissed his forehead. She heard him murmur to her in his sleep, words not quite audible or intelligible but they sounded like ’
Riah love you
.
Then he sank into sleep again. Rarely less than eight hours a night.
Now that they were safely married. Ariah tried to ease her naked-sticky body into such a position that her arm, her leg, her side didn’t become numb, circulation cut off by her husband’s weight. She loved that weight. When he made love to her she wanted to be crushed, flattened. Smothered. “Oh come inside me! Deeper.” It was curious that the man entered her body, yet seemed to surround her body. It was curious that they fitted together so perfectly, a hand in a glove, though anyone could see at a glance that they were the wrong sizes for each other.
The distant murmur of the Gorge. The murmur of their blood.
Maybe she was pregnant? How surprised Dirk would be.
Or maybe not surprised. They’d taken no precautions in Ariah’s residence in Troy, and they’d been taking no precautions since. It must have been understood between them that they wanted children?
You only live once.
This phrase Ariah had picked up from Dirk, that seemed to her both fatalistic and optimistic.
You only live once.
It made her smile, it seemed to release you to anything you wanted.
They were married, and each night was an adventure.
The man was so new in her inner, secret life, he didn’t always have a name.
Husband
would do.
She clutched this husband tight. Her lightly freckled arms were slender, but strong. The strength of cunning and desperation. She’d been playing piano since age eight, which means playing scales tirelessly, fanatically, and that strengthens your arms, wrists, and fingers.
She marveled that she’d seized for herself, in these arms, so remarkable a man. But she was humble, too. Perhaps she was even frightened.
Knowing from past experience that God (in Whom she didn’t believe, in the daytime at least) could snatch him back at any time.
There was daytime lovemaking, and there was nighttime love-120 W
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making. By degrees, so gradually the change was almost imperceptible, the daytime lovemaking (with its air of being illicit, like chocolates before a meal) would fade, as the excited newness of married life must fade, but the nighttime lovemaking would continue, passionate and reverent, for some time. After love, Ariah would cradle her husband, who burrowed against her in a sweaty infantile bliss; she would stroke his big magnificent body, smooth his springy hair out of his eyes, murmur
I love you! My husband.
She could not have believed that any wife had ever so adored any husband. She could not have believed that her mother and father, from whom she was now estranged, had ever so adored each other. Always, the elder Littrells had been middle-aged. Ariah pitied them. Ariah was frightened by their exam-ple.
That will never happen to me. To this man and me.
She smiled to think that Ariah Littrell had been such a sullen sulky petulant girl growing up in the rectory under the watchful gaze of her elders, such a sharp-tongued and sharp-elbowed schoolgirl always a straight-A student, (secretly) bored and restless in church during her very father’s sermons. Yet, somehow, undeserving as she was, she was now
happy
.
One night when she’d been Mrs. Dirk Burnaby for just fifteen days, she saw through the lattice window beyond their bed a sickle moon glowing through columns of mist like a winking eye. She was cradling her deeply sleeping husband in her arms. She meant to protect him forever! Yet her eyelids began to flutter. Her eyes were shutting. She opened them wide to see her husband crossing the immense Niagara Gorge on—what was it? A tightrope? A
tightrope
? His back was to her. His fair flaxen hair blew in the wind. He wore a black costume, ministerial. He was carrying a twelve-foot bamboo pole to balance himself. It was a performance appropriate to a circus but, here, deadly. And there was the wind. Why was he doing such a thing, why when they loved each other so much?
At shore, Ariah leaned over an iron railing that dug into her waist and cried out to him in a raw, terrified voice.
Come back! I love you! You
can’t leave me!
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2
T h e y w e r e m a r r i e d, in love and in haste.
Amid whispers, murmurs, accusations. Tearful proclamations of disapproval.
How can you? What are you thinking of ? Only of yourself ? So
soon after Gilbert’s death? Have you no shame?
Married in a brief civil ceremony, not in a church. Not in the bride’s hometown, Troy, but in Niagara Falls. A private ceremony at City Hall and no relatives invited.
Shame!
Ariah’s heart pumped hard. Damned if she would cry.
She intended never to cry again, she was so happy.
With dignity Ariah explained: “Actually, there is shame. The world is heaped with shame like spoiling garbage. The death camps?
Remember the Nazi death camps? Corpses stacked like firewood.
‘Survivors’ like skeletons. You saw the same photographs I did, in
Life
. You lived through the same history as I did. There you have shame. And more than shame. But Dirk Burnaby and I don’t share in that shame, you see. We love each other and we see no reason to pretend that we don’t. Especially we see no reason to pretend that our private behavior is anyone’s business except our own.”
It was a brilliant little speech, and almost flawlessly delivered. A slight tremor in Ariah’s lower lip betrayed some emotion.
Mrs. Littrell was taken ill. Reverend Littrell, furious as Christ driving the moneylenders from the temple, forbade his daughter to return to the rectory, ever.
They were married, with no need to vow
Till death do us part
.
They were married, and God had nothing to do with their happiness.
They were married, and possibly the bride was pregnant.
In the bliss of first love Ariah tried not to think of the consequences of love. In those early days and weeks her brain was in a fever 122 W
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of love. She was a giddy young girl dancing! dancing! dancing!
through the night, never tiring.
I could not say to my husband: I may be pregnant
.
You may not be the father
.
No more than I could say to this man
:
I know you will leave me one day
.
I
know I’m damned
.
But until then, I mean to be your loving wife
.
They were married, and in marriage you expect children. Sooner or later.
Married, which is to say mated.
Mating
was the physical consequence of
marriage,
and there was little that was abstract about it.
“I must be realistic.”
So Ariah scolded herself. In her bliss of married contentment yet she had to brood upon certain facts that weren’t going to go away.