Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
This was the purpose of coming to Atlantic City, I realized. They’d made the trip before. They’d “gambled” here before. The prizes of the evening had to do with free money, so to speak, plucked by the girls like overripe fruit on a tree.
I did not mind being sidelined, watching. Like a chaperone, though I wasn’t much older than my friends. Out of my black handbag which was nothing like the small glittery evening bags the girls were carrying I drew a half-dozen pages of the Eweian manuscript printout to read, or try to read, despite the dim lighting that made everything seem undersea.
Infanticide. Ritual cleansing. Not an act against the infant but an act of desperate self-survival. Involuntary, instinctive.
I thought this must be so. In a long-ago era before God entered time with His strictures of human moral behavior.
Yet, there were other aspects of the text in which the author’s meaning was less clear. I was beginning to see that the ancient text contained another, secret text inside it. The surface text was just a patina, the truth lay beneath.
“Girl, put that shit away—it Friday night in ’Lantic City not some crappy ol’ schoolroom.”
Maralena and Salaman caught me squinting at the manuscript pages and slapped them out of my hand.
As the hours passed, the crowd in the casino increased. Roaming men appeared to be circling us like rogue-male animals. Some of them offered to buy us drinks, dinner. What principle my companions had for coldly dismissing such invitations, or warmly accepting them, I could not determine for all the men looked about equally attractive, or unattractive, to me.
Yet: how happy I was! Not knowing where I was.
The alcohol had gone to my head. I didn’t know what one of the men had bought me—vodka? I heard myself laughing gaily.
“Are you these girls’—
teacher
? But what’re you doing here, ’Lantic City on a Friday night?”
In the Taj my friends returned to blackjack. It was 10:20
P.M.
Separated from them by other players, I could only see their backs—the backs of their heads. I felt a thrill of panic—I would lose them, they would be lost to me. Was I not responsible for them, driving them to Atlantic City in my car? For each girl had now a male companion, to buy her drinks and lend her precious tokens. I wondered what Leander would think of his sexy cousin’s behavior. I wanted to think that Leander would disapprove, and sic Dargo on any predatory male.
I wasn’t jealous. (I don’t think so.) I wasn’t envious. But maybe I was beginning to be concerned for Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes whom I would be driving back to Trenton that night, as we had planned.
Why was I here? Where was this place? A swirl of mad music, strobe lighting, heart-quickening cries and laughter. Some distance away at the slots one of the manic machines had erupted in victory, spewing lights, marching music, tokens. You had to wonder who’d won—had he/she
won big
, or, more likely,
won small.
Most wins were small. Just enough to keep the machine going.
Most players were losers, in fact. Otherwise, how could a casino keep in business?
I’d known, from a Trenton newspaper, that most of the Atlantic City casino-hotels, like those in the more prestigious Las Vegas, had had a very bad year. They were hemorrhaging money. Several had filed for bankruptcy. The very Taj Mahal, a landmark on the Boardwalk, was deeply in debt.
Yet, the party continued. The gaiety continued. The gamblers had no sense of the casino as a business enterprise out to exploit their naïveté, no more than they had of fate. It was sobering to me to realize how each day, each night, indistinguishable from one another in the windowless casino in which no clocks were ever displayed, individuals placed themselves at the slot machines, at the blackjack tables, riveted to their immediate transient fates. They were like entranced spirits of Hades—nothing could wake them from their trance except a sudden
win
. It was yet more sobering to see that so many were elderly, walking with difficulty, with canes, or walkers; yet grimly determined to play the slots, to yank the levers, peer at the whirling fruits through bifocal glasses. So many were African-American, a surprise to me. And Asian-American, another surprise.
What a joke! My brother and I squandering what remained of our youth in research into arcane “religious” subjects. How could we imagine that anyone cared, that we could make a serious contribution to our culture that was a fevered casino-culture obsessed with
big wins
?
The pages they’d slapped from my fingers were on the floor, beneath my feet. My fingers groped for them but couldn’t pick them up.
How scale walls of Hades
?—the question came unbidden.
I’d had a drink—I’d begun a second drink—confused, that the drinks tasted different.
Somehow, sharing a drink with Mercedes. She’d brought her man-friend to meet me—unless this was a man-friend for
me.
His face looked like a clam’s face—if a clam had a face—upon which a dyed-black moustache had been pasted. And what remained of his hair was dyed-black, combed over a lumpy scalp.
“You these girls’
teacher
—somebody said? What kinda class is it, Lyd-ja, you are teaching?” Very funny, the clam-faced man laughed heartily. I saw a nubby glisten inside his mouth, a metal-laced molar.
This man, Mercedes’s friend, was trying to escort me somewhere—to the blackjack table? to a nearby bar?—but I managed to wrest my arm loose from his fingers. He cursed me, bluntly. On an escalator I was borne upward—escaping from Clam-Face—the air currents in the Taj were such, I felt the ends of my hair lifting in the breeze—and at the top of the escalator there was an open space, and a brass railing where you could stand to gaze out over the interior of the Taj designed like a bad Indian stage set, the “Taj Mahal” as imagined by a crude American entrepreneur.
I wanted a microphone! I wanted to be heard! I leaned over the railing waving my arms like a demented semaphore.
“‘How scale walls of Hades’! Plato says this is a vale of illusion! A cave of illusions! Delusions! The casino is the cave! You must wake yourself—save your souls!”
A security guard came quickly to lead me away. No one below in the milling casino had heard me—no one had so much as glanced up at me—except my concerned friends Maralena and Salaman who ascended the escalator after me.
Maralena said to the security guard, “Hey man, she just kiddin. She not drunk, hey. Not ust to all this excitement, like—she mostly stay home in Tr’nton. We take care of our girlfriend, O.K.?”
The security guard was tall, well beyond six feet. He wore a uniform that fitted his muscular body like a glove. His face was blunt-boned, his skin as velvety-dark as Leander’s. I wanted him to look at me kindly, or at least not with open hostility, but he ignored me entirely speaking to my companions in a low baritone bemused/exasperated tone:
“She is drunk. You think I can’t recognize, you’ friend is
drunk
? Just keep her from high places. Don’t matter what bullshit she be sayin, nobody can hear her anyway. You got me?”
“Thanks man! We appreciate this.”
And Salaman said, almost wistfully: “Man you one sweet cool dude.”
* * *
“I be drivin. Girl, you sleep in the backseat.”
Maralena spoke firmly. Though she’d had far more to drink than I had yet she’d managed to “sober up”—she claimed—with two cups of black coffee.
Coffee! The mere thought turned my stomach.
Maralena and Salaman helped me crawl into the backseat of the Mazda. The vinyl seat cover was icy-cold. How many drinks had I had?—not more than two, or three.
Still, I did not feel—well, “real.”
Confused as I’d been falling down the stairs at—what was the name of the residence hall—not Jester College—but another place: where my Newcomb fellowship provided a room for me—my heel catching in the frayed carpeting on the stairs and I’d plunged down, down . . .
Hello? Are you all right? Let me help you. . .
“How she doin, you think? She ain’t ust to drinkin or maybe stayin up late.”
“She ain’t ust to
nothin much
.”
They were laughing at me. Not cruel but affectionate laughter.
Or maybe, slightly ridiculing laughter. Now my wallet was empty of all paper money.
“She pathetic, eh? She just don’
get it
.”
“L’nd’r, he like her O.K. He say, the white-girl sister is gon be his girl, they get things straight between them.”
“What’s that mean—‘things straight between them’?”
“Fuck how’d I know? L’nd’r aint even my cousin, he just some boy hangin around my uncle’s house, we all growin up.”
And they laughed together. No idea why.
It was mean of them to laugh at me when I was helpless.
In the jostling car, on the cold vinyl seat, I kept trying to wake up yet with each effort I fell back into sleep. Trying to explain to a buzzing crowd
How scale walls of—whatever.
Someone was missing: only three of us in the car hurtling at above the speed limit on the Garden State Parkway in the starless late-night through New Jersey countryside blank and bleak as a cinder wall. For reckless Mercedes had decided to stay a while longer in the casino—she’d connected with a man who’d offered to drive her home in his Jaguar, or maybe he’d rent a room for them, a suite, at the Borgata.
Maralena said vehement and disapproving, “That
girl!
She gon regret this! Her age, she don’t know shit how to handle a man even some old pissy white asshole like that one. You wait, she gon be sorry.”
“Her pappy, he gon be damn unhappy. Fuck, I ain’t gon mess with
him
.”
Now I was worried, Mercedes hadn’t come back with us. As the girls’ “teacher,” I would be blamed for her absence.
If something happened to Mercedes, I would be blamed.
Trying to determine how much money I’d lost that night—tokens I’d gambled away, given away or “loaned”—each time I calculated the sum it was different.
No less than five hundred dollars, certainly. Six hundred?
Next I knew, I was being shaken awake by Maralena—“Lyd’ja! Wake up girl, you
home
.”
The car wasn’t carjacked after all. One of my friends had called a relative on her cell, to come pick them up at Grindell Park.
And there was Harvey helping me to walk the stairs. Agitated and disapproving saying words I couldn’t decipher, chiding me, cursing me, in Aramaic for all that I knew.
A
n evil smell in the apartment. Smells.
And whenever I went out, and returned, the contrast between the outdoor air—(even the polluted “outdoor air” of Trenton, New Jersey)—was so extreme, I felt faint stepping into my brother’s apartment.
Something has died here. Mice, rats in the walls. . .
It was always shocking to see, my brother who’d once been over six feet tall, now no taller than I was, and nearly as thin. I slid my arm around his waist to assist his walking and Harvey was resistant at first then unprotesting, ironic. His vertebrae felt loose like marbles caught inside his skin.
Harvey hated the clinic. Hated rehab, and the clinic where he had to submit to “blood work”—two small vials of blood drawn from his veins that had become increasingly shrunken, difficult of access.
These were veins in arms, legs, even feet. In case you thought these were veins merely in Harvey’s arms.
In the days following Atlantic City I awaited the wrath of Mercedes’s
pappy
. I feared that something had happened to the reckless girl and I would be blamed. I feared that something had happened and I would never see my friends again. Yet I could not bring myself to telephone Maralena on her cell phone, I seemed to know beforehand that my friend had no interest in hearing from me; if I identified myself she would exclaim in her bright vivacious bird-voice
Who? Who that? Sorry you callin a wrong number.
Must be that I loved my brother, that was why I was here.
Depressing clinic on State Street, Trenton. Not far from Book Bazaar but we had no time for Book Bazaar today.
Welfare, Family Services, Trenton Rescue Mission. Pawnshops and bail-bond shops amid vacant stores on every street. And the white dome of the State Capitol building rising above the ruin of the city, less than a mile away, like a luminous cloud.
It was trickery, but also desperation. For ever more that I lived with him, and came to know him, and beneath the patina of his difficult personality, came to love him—I wanted to know my brother’s secret for then perhaps I could save his life.
“How’s my brother doing, d’you think?”—it was a deceptively casual question put to the nurse at the clinic who might’ve seen me once or twice before in my brother’s company, but didn’t really know me; for the medical records of patients are meant to be
confidential,
and Harvey had not ever revealed to me what his medical condition was except he was “anemic”—had some kind of “low blood count.” And he’d had some sort of “rehab” that had to be related, I supposed, to drugs. The nurse hesitated before she confided in me, in a lowered voice, and in a way to indicate that she assumed that I already knew these somber facts—
“For HIV patients, it’s the medication—how well it works, and how they tolerate it. How their general health is, of course. Your brother has other issues too, you know—he isn’t using now, he says, but—he
was
.”
For the nurse, it was Harvey’s (possible) drug use that was the issue; for me, the stunning news was HIV.
My brother was HIV-positive!
“Yes. You are right. Yes—thank you.”
I turned away, not wanting the woman to see tears of anguish welling in my eyes.
Tears of chagrin, disappointment.
Too dazed to sit with rows of patients and their relatives in the crowded and airless waiting room. Better to remain standing, or step outside into the cold air.
Why hadn’t I known, or guessed? Why had I wanted to think that Harvey’s medical condition was only drugs? And why hadn’t Harvey told me? When I’d virtually cast away my life for him.
When Harvey emerged from the interior of the clinic, nearly an hour later, I was still in a state of shock but had taken a seat by this time.
Harvey complained in his affably embittered way of having to be “poked” for the blood work. “Fuck that needle! The tech can’t find a vein, God damn makes me feel like a Death Row prisoner they’re poking to get the death-IV
in
.” Harvey laughed as if he’d said something witty. Then he saw me, blinked and stared at me. “Lydia? You all right?”
“Yes. I am—‘all right.’ ”
“You know, I told you not to come to the clinic with me, I’m perfectly capable of coming here by myself.”
“I know. You’ve said.”
Exiting the clinic Harvey was about to propel himself down the steps then wisely hesitated. Wordlessly I slid my arm around his waist, as before.
I’d glimpsed Band-Aids on the insides of both his bruised arms. Very likely there were Band-Aids on the insides of his legs as well, and on his ankles. I would not ask.
Such pity for my brother, such love!—yet it was an angry love.
For Harvey was to blame, I thought—HIV-positive!
No wonder he’d left the seminary, escaped to another life where no one knew him and would not judge him.
No wonder he’d taken up poetry as the most futile gesture of his life.
Quietly I said, guiding his descent down the cement steps, “I don’t blame you, Harvey. If anyone is to blame it’s me.”
* * *
A second time, as it was a final time, I returned to Book Bazaar. I yearned to see Wystan again. In my loneliness in Grindell Park—in my fevered imagination—the secondhand bookstore clerk had grown more attractive. I’d forgotten the disheveled hair, the baggy T-shirt and cargo pants—if Wystan’s face hovered in my memory it was now blurred with light, like those ghostly figures on TV that are being censored for reasons of privacy, or decency.
Somehow, Wystan was merging with Harvey. With an old memory of Harvey. And hadn’t Wystan said that Harvey was a “patrician” of some sort—and so was I; hadn’t Wystan said that Harvey was “the most remarkable person” he’d ever met.
The name suggested refinement—“Wystan.” And he’d seemed to like me—he’d followed me through the store. He’d hinted at treasures in the basement. He’d tried to acquire my address but, foolishly, I had refused him.
“ ‘Wystan’? He doesn’t work here anymore.”
A fattish woman of bleak and dissatisfied middle age regarded me suspiciously. In her mouth, “Wystan” had a flat New Jersey twang.
So suspiciously, you would think that a succession of conniving females had trooped into the bookstore, each seeking the elusive Wystan.
“Oh.” My disappointment showed in my face, clearly.
“He didn’t give notice. Just quit. That is—disappeared. And without closing the store, or calling one of us.” The woman spoke with angry reproach, peering at me. “Are you a friend, miss?”
“N-No. I guess—I’m not–a friend . . .”
The woman frowned at me, as if I’d said something particularly stupid. For why would I be looking for the bookstore clerk, if I weren’t a friend; and why, if I weren’t a friend, was I looking for someone so shabby, so disreputable, so pathetic, and such a loser?
Faltering I asked if she knew where Wystan had gone.
Briskly, and with an air of mean satisfaction, the woman said she had no idea.
Did he work somewhere else? I wondered. In Trenton?
“I’ve told you, miss—I have no idea.”
The woman’s curt manner suggested to me that she wasn’t a mere employee, as Wystan had been. Not the owner of the store, or a manager but—more likely—the disgruntled wife of the owner.
Though I understood it was hopeless to try to engage the woman in any sort of exchange I heard myself asking, doggedly: “When did he leave the store?”
“ ‘Leave the store’? I have no idea.”
The obfuscatory way in which the woman spoke was bewildering to me. There was a secret here, a subtext.
I thought
Wystan has not left the store. He disappeared into the basement—into the books. No one has seen him since.
Though she had not been very helpful I thanked the woman politely. It is one of the principles of my social behavior that I try not to repay rudeness with more rudeness; I try to repay ill treatment with a friendly smile, or at least a neutral smile.
Under the woman’s dubious gaze I made my way to the Religion/ Anthropology shelves as if drawn by a magnet. It was a shock—not a good shock—to see a copy of the bound galley of
Cleansing Rituals: Mother, Infant, Taboo
—the doctoral dissertation published by the University of California Press which I’d been assigned to review, but had not reviewed. I felt a touch of vertigo, that a rival had so bypassed me.
At the cashier’s counter the woman was squinting in my direction. As if to confound her suspicions of me I selected two paperbacks—
God of the Oppressed
,
The Hermeneutics of Desire.
But I wasn’t yet ready to leave Book Bazaar
.
My heartbeat quickened as I approached the stairs to the basement. Slowly I descended, step by step. I knew, or seemed to know—Wystan was there, in some way.
As he’d told me, the large, narrow, cave-like room was filled with books—boxes, cartons, and shopping bags filled with books, floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, books stacked on the floor. Against one wall were rows of flattened cardboard boxes and emptied cartons. The air was close and smelled of dust, grime, Time—a faint odor that reminded me of my brother’s apartment, especially on humid days.
Softly I whispered, “Wystan? Hello? It’s Lydia—a friend . . .”
My eye was drawn to a farther corner of the cavernous room where the walls had become indistinct, as if dissolved in shadow; as if the dark earth beyond were pressing inward. There was a kind of pressure here, I felt—an indefinable yet palpable pressure.
Cautiously I stepped away from the stairs. There were narrow pathways between partially unpacked boxes and cartons. How like a graveyard the room was, dimly lit by tremulous fluorescent lights overhead. Wystan had remarked that he’d heard voices here, whispers—he’d seen figures at the periphery of his vision. I steeled myself for these also but saw and heard nothing except the muffled sounds of traffic outside the grimy basement windows.
I waited, scarcely breathing. Though Wystan didn’t reveal himself to me, I felt his presence. Almost, I saw the man’s face—a familiar homely-but-beloved face like that of a relative who is rarely seen yet nonetheless exerts an abiding spell over you.
There was a sound of footsteps, the creaking floor overhead. As if someone were walking there, approaching the opened door to the stairs.
Quickly I whispered, “Wystan? Good-bye. I think—I guess—I won’t be coming back . . .”
There was a sound at the top of the stairs: the fattish middle-aged woman, suspicious of me.
Was I rummaging through cartons looking for rare, signed first editions; was I going to hide a precious book inside my coat; was I to be trusted, who looked so furtive?
The flat nasal New Jersey voice called down to me: “Can I help you, miss? Are you looking for anything in particular? Books in the basement haven’t been sorted and categorized yet, so we prefer that customers not come down here.”
I returned to the ground floor. I made an effort to smile at the glowering woman who rang up my modest purchases on an old-fashioned cash register with an air of scarcely concealed impatience. I realized that she resented her life, she resented and hated books.
She is not someone’s wife but someone’s left-behind wife. She too has been abandoned to the book graveyard.
With my few remaining low-denomination bills I paid for my books thinking with what pleasure I would read them, as if Wystan himself had pressed them into my hand.
* * *
Like a large white finely cracked egg Harvey’s secret lay between us.
The egg in the swans’ nest. Just visibly cracked, containing death and decay and not a fuzzy little cygnet.
But when will the swans acknowledge the death-egg? Is it possible to choose a specific hour, a moment, when such an irrevocable truth must be uttered?
Swans mate for life, it’s said. A sister and a brother too are “mated for life”—irrevocably, by blood.
Harvey would not reveal his secret to me, I knew. Nor could I reveal Harvey’s secret to him—that I knew it.
Did we love each other enough, to withstand such a secret? Or did we love each other too much, to withstand such a secret?
For the first time in a very long time, I called my parents—tried to call my parents. But a recording clicked on:
This number has been disconnected.
Disconnected! I was shocked, and puzzled.
I called one of my sisters who told me that of course our parents’ phone was disconnected—they’d made a big move, surely they’d told me about it?—to Orlando, Florida.
Big move? Orlando? I knew nothing of this.
“They’re living in a ‘gated retirement community’—‘no children allowed.’ I’ve seen pictures on the Internet, but we haven’t visited them yet. Haven’t been invited.” My sister laughed in that rueful way in which we’d learned to laugh, speaking of our parents.
I was stunned by this news. I felt betrayed by this news.
I hung up the phone, not knowing what I’d said to my sister, or if I’d said anything coherent at all.
Guess where our parents are!
I wanted to goad Harvey.
Guess who has abandoned us, in Trenton!
Of course, I never said a word to my brother.
* * *
Days had passed. Eventually, weeks.
I had failed to reply to Professor A.’s e-mail and to several e-mails from the director of the Newcomb program. E-mails to me from these individuals had ceased.
And so, one day I set out on a journey: to drive to the fabled University sixty miles to the north.
The distance was
not far
. Yet, my uneasiness was such, the distance felt
very far.
Much of the drive would be along Route 1. I consoled myself, it should not have taken more than an hour.
I tried to rehearse what I would say to Professor A. What I would say about my “progress” in translating the Eweian manuscript, and when I believed I might finish it. How I believed I would be interpreting the material in my thesis.
I don’t agree with you at all, Professor A. I think you are an old fool and utterly mistaken. But I want your imprimatur on my thesis, Professor. I want your blessing.