Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
He’d become dependent upon the Intern, these past eight months.
Not on
her,
he’d have been quick to explain. But on her as his assistant.
Now, abruptly and unbelievably, unconscionably, their association seemed to be ending.
She was saying—oh but what was she saying?
He was saying—Betrayal.
Furious with her now. In an instant his surprise, his concern, his sympathy, his embarrassment at her faltering words—now fury.
“You’d given me your word. You would help me in this project. I told you—about eighteen months. I’ve trained you, and I’ve invested time in you, and now you’re saying you need to leave—to go ‘home’—which means that you’d lied to me, when I interviewed you. You lied to me and you’ve betrayed me.”
“I—I will try to come back. I don’t know when, I . . .”
“ ‘Come back’! If you leave now, you will not ‘come back.’ ”
“But I—I would hope to see you again, Dr. Hinton . . .”
(Though “Hinton” wasn’t his name. What his name
was,
the Intern had not been told.)
Stiffly he said, “There is no need for you to ‘see me again,’ McSwain.”
“But when—if— After—”
“I can’t wait for you to return. From wherever you think you’re going—‘home.’ Where is it, upstate New York?”
The Investigator spoke sneeringly, his voice hoarse. The Intern had never seen the Investigator so agitated.
“I will call you. I will try to . . .”
“You gave me your word. You betrayed me. I could never trust you again, McSwain.”
The Intern tried to think of a way to reply. The Intern was weak with shame, self-disgust.
The Intern did think, she had betrayed the Investigator.
Betrayal
—that was the correct word.
She had
betrayed
. Numerous others, she’d
betrayed.
“I will interview for another assistant. I will run ads. I’m sure that I can find a replacement. I will stress ‘computer skills’ this time. But I will not contact Chantelle Rios again.”
The Investigator spoke bitterly. It was clear, the Investigator was badly hurt.
The Intern wanted to clutch at him but dared not. The Intern knew that this man fifty years her elder would stare at her in disgust, throw off her fingers as you’d throw off a snake brushing against your arm.
The Intern felt again the sensation of breakage, from within. Her personality was falling apart. She’d cobbled together a self, out of fragments, she’d glued and pasted and tacked and taped, and this self had managed to prevail for quite a long time. But now, after the airlessness of the execution chamber, after the death sentence she understood was her own, she was falling apart.
In fact stumbling out of the Investigator’s rented house. She would not be staying the night of course. She would never return. The Investigator was waiting for her to depart, the Investigator would slam the door behind her and lock it.
On the stairs the Intern lost her balance. The Intern would have struck her head against a railing except she managed to block the fall, just barely.
“Fuck. God-damn
fuck
.”
In disgust the Investigator hauled her up the stairs. Into a chair.
The Investigator’s breath smelled of whiskey.
Fury-fumes. Disgust.
The Investigator held the Intern in the chair, so that she didn’t slump, sink, fall.
The Investigator held the Intern in his arms. The Intern was stupidly weeping.
The Intern was saying she had to leave. She had to return—
home
.
Years she’d been gone. How many years she wasn’t sure.
She’d done something wrong,
back there
. She’d made a mistake.
Or rather, something had happened to her, that had been a mistake.
And so, she had to return. She would have to beg forgiveness.
The Investigator couldn’t make sense of much of this. The Investigator listened, with a pained expression.
This day, March 11, 2012, had begun a very long time ago. The Investigator was seventy-five years old and as he liked to complain to the Intern, not so young as he’d once been.
The Investigator had no choice, he had to comfort the Intern who grasped his hands, and kissed his hands. In a paroxysm of foolishness the Intern who had never betrayed the slightest emotion for eight months was now crying. Warm tears fell on the Investigator’s hands. The Intern was filling her lungs with oxygen like one in danger of suffocating, for so little of the oxygen she inhaled was making its way to her brain. He said, All right—take this.
From the middle finger of his right hand he removed the silver star-ring. The Intern had never dared to ask him what this ring was, what this ring might commemorate. Now, the Investigator tugged it from his finger, and slipped it over hers.
Of course, the star-ring was much too large for the Intern’s slender finger.
The Investigator sent her away. For it was time, the Intern must leave.
The Investigator said, You have my number. If you need me to come to you, call me. But otherwise, if you need me, come to me. Until then.
The Intern went away scattering tears on the pavement. The Intern went away uncertain if she’d heard these words of the Investigator or if she’d imagined them or would imagine them that very night in her bed, in her exhausted delirious sleep bearing her back to the Nautauga Preserve, to the lost debased girl stumbling through the Preserve in terror of extinction.
Went away from the Investigator’s house on the Rio Vista Canal turning the beautiful silver-star ring on the middle finger of her right hand, loose on the finger, round and round.
H
E’D SAID
DON’T WANT
you get away you disgust me.
FOR A LONG
time then unable to speak.
Mute as if her vocal cords had been cut. As if handfuls of dirt had been shoved into her mouth, and into her throat.
Her face ground into the dirt.
Ugly ugly ugly girl you don’t deserve to live.
DIED WHEN
he’d shoved her from him.
Died when he’d shoved her away like trash.
Like a wounded animal crawling through underbrush. The shame of such injury, physical mortification. The wounded animal wants only to hide, to expire. Dying, dissolution must be solitary.
They—the Mayfields—had owned a dog, when the girls had been young children. Beautiful speckled-chestnut setter, Rob Roy his name, he’d been twelve years old when he began to disappear from the household, at first for only a few mysterious hours, then longer, at last overnight, his lustrous brown eyes so suddenly fading, his attention turning from them as if averted, drawn elsewhere. They’d called and called
Rob Roy! Rob Roy! Good boy Rob Roy come home!
But Rob Roy had not come home and they’d found him at last, the girls shrieking with grief, Zeno and Arlette heartbroken, the valiant Rob Roy had crawled away to die in the dense underbrush beyond the Episcopalian churchyard of what a veterinarian friend had later guessed might have been cancer and ever afterward Zeno had only to say quietly
Like Rob Roy . . .
for intimates of the family to know that he meant
dignity, courage, selflessness, a wish to spare others, a great dog’s heart.
THAT WAS THE MOTIVE,
the disgraced girl could not have named.
Such shame, such mortification. Not to be named.
On her lacerated hands and knees crawling. Rocks, sharp-edged pebbles strewn at the narrow shore. In pitch-dark, beneath a befouled sky. And he’d called after her furious, frightened—
Cressida! Where are you! Come back here—God damn come back here! I’m sorry—
Or maybe he’d called after her, and she had not heard.
Or maybe he’d called after her, and his words had lacked the strength to reach her blown back into his face by fierce hot wind-gusts out of the sulfurous summer sky.
For he, too—
Iraq War vet, wounded, Purple Heart, multiple disabilities, neuropsychological deficits—
had been dazed, stunned; he’d been drinking, despite having taken psychoactive medications though he knew, should have known, had been warned that he should not drink even lightly while taking these medications and particularly, he should not be driving any vehicle; his words had been slurred, the vision in his good eye blotched, he hadn’t the strength to act as he’d have acted ordinarily—climbing out of the Jeep and pursuing the mortified girl, the bloody-faced girl, young-girl sister of his fiancée.
Pursuing her, and bringing her back. Daring to lift her, carry her back to the Jeep.
Instead, she’d escaped him. He could not see where she’d gone, after she’d thrown herself from the Jeep.
A faint moon high overhead. Obscured by rain-heavy clouds.
The rushing sound of the Nautauga River. Frothy-white current, rapids in the shallower water.
Farther out, the river was about fifteen feet deep. The drop-off was sudden, treacherous.
NO SWIMMING
signs grown weatherworn with the years were posted at intervals.
She’d intended to crawl into the river and the river would bear her body away, and no one would know how she’d been rejected, cast-away.
Stop this! Get away from me! Don’t mean this—you don’t want . . .
Pushing her from him blindly as a shocked boy might—a fastidious boy—brother, cousin—whom she’d dared to touch in a way
wrong, distasteful
to him.
Instinctively he’d reacted. This was
wrong.
Though he’d been drinking for several hours, and was no prude.
Brett Kincaid: a guy you didn’t mess with.
Sure he’d been a nice guy—before. But now, after his fiancée dumped him, her family treated him like shit ’cause he’s shot-up and not pretty to look at—now, Kincaid isn’t a guy you messed with.
Still, Brett had driven the young-sister home, that was the intention. That, witnesses would report.
Not that they’d gotten
home
—that hadn’t happened.
Still, he’d meant to. Brett wasn’t so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing or who this girl was, the younger Mayfield sister wasn’t the kind of girl he’d choose to become involved with sexually, for sure not the kind he could take for granted knew what sex meant. There were women, and there were
girls
—now he wasn’t a kid any longer he wasn’t so interested in
girls
any longer. After Iraq especially.
Girls
he turned from quickly, fighting a sensation of sick-dread.
And maybe—(these were ugly rumors, suggested with smirks and sneers by Brett’s old high school friends)—Corporal Kincaid was impotent since the war. Maybe where the poor bastard’s penis had been there was a gnarled stub of flesh, barely adequate to hold a catheter.
They’d misunderstood each other. Possibly that was it.
She—the girl—the younger Mayfield sister—had been drinking, too. A single beer, an immediate sensation of recklessness, audacity, laughter—
Brett. Look at me for once. Know what we are?—soul mates. Now you’re disfigured like me.
He’d been shocked by this remark. He’d been deeply wounded, insulted. But seeing the girl was alone, and had to be his responsibility since he was the one who knew her family, he’d tried to ignore the insult. Thinking
She is just a kid. What the fuck does she know!
It was clear, Cressida Mayfield wasn’t accustomed to drinking. And the din of the Roebuck Inn—loud voices, laughter, music—was jarring to her.
In the parking lot, a deafening noise of motorcycles. Adirondacks Hells Angels.
A solitary girl at the Roebuck, Saturday night—a terrible blunder.
Stupid, heedless. And how to turn back, she had no idea.
And then, why not
take a chance.
She was in love with her sister’s fiancé. She should not have been ashamed, to be in love with him.
And the more she thought of it, of the fact of her love for Brett Kincaid, the more confident she was, despite her rapidly beating heart that signaled alarm, that it was
the right, the moral thing to do
—to tell Brett.
Her sister had given him up—(hadn’t she?)—so there was no question that Cressida was hoping to appropriate Juliet’s fiancé. Was it so terrible, so unnatural, nineteen-year-old Cressida who had not yet had a lover, had not yet so much as kissed another person with passion, nor been kissed with passion, should feel so powerful a yearning for Brett Kincaid; that she should want him to look at her in the way he looked at Juliet; that she should want to touch him, to caress him, the serrated scars on his neck and the underside of his jaw, scar-welts, sinewy-snake-welts she’d had a glimpse of, on his back. That he limped, that the vision in one of his eyes had been destroyed, that he winced with pain like currents of electricity darting through his body yet managed to laugh—to try to laugh; that he would not complain, or denigrate the U.S. military as some had urged him; that he was the individual he’d once been, now trapped within the disfigured body of the
wounded vet,
and you could see in his eyes the shock, misery, and resignation of his condition—all these factors made Cressida love Brett Kincaid the more.
Months now and yet what seemed to her much of her life in recent years adrift in a dream.
Now it is my turn. Why should it not be my turn?
She was convinced, she loved Brett Kincaid more than her sister had loved him, or was capable of loving him.
Convinced
He must know this!
That evening at Marcy Meyer’s house. That evening she’d come close to fainting seeing herself at the table with the others—with the
females
—Marcy who was her high school friend, Marcy’s mother, and Marcy’s grandmother—the food they’d eaten, the kitchen-smells, the familiar wallpaper, scented pink toilet paper in the guest bathroom adjacent to the dining room and the adults’ well-intentioned blundering questions
And how is St. Lawrence University, Cressida? Did you enjoy your professors?
This life she found herself living—a
half-life.
At Canton, in early-morning solitary hikes along the St. Lawrence River she’d been happy, at unpredictable times—only when she’d forgotten her particular life; the (arbitrary, accidental) circumstances that boxed her in, like a trapped animal.
She’d been in love with Brett Kincaid, even then. Before returning at the end of the spring term.
Before seeing him again, so altered.
Himself and yet—
altered.
So very difficult to comprehend
—(she could imagine herself making this argument, in a public forum)—
how if you feel very strongly, if you believe very strongly, with no doubt, that what you feel and believe is not true.
In “History of Science” at St. Lawrence their professor had lectured on
hyper-selectionism
. This was an evolutionary theory at odds with Darwin’s theory of evolution through the randomness of natural selection.
Darwin’s rival Alfred Russel Wallace had not finally believed in
natural selection
—this was too radical a belief, for the era. Wallace had believed that the brain of
Homo sapiens
is “overdesigned” and can’t be the consequence of random accidents—
A superior intelligence must have guided the development of man in a definite direction
.
In recent years,
hyper-selectionism
had been resurrected in conservative-American religious quarters as
intelligent design.
Cressida knew, it was Darwin whom every intellectual and every scientist revered, and not Wallace. Cressida knew, it was very likely the randomness of life, and not the “design” of life, that triumphed.
Yet, her feeling for Brett Kincaid was so powerful, and so
particular
—it felt to her as if “overdesigned.”
Her secret, she had not told anyone. Of course, Cressida Mayfield wasn’t one to confide in anyone.
With Marcy Meyer she’d fabricated a shrewd-canny-cool Cressida-self who hadn’t given a damn for boys, and now didn’t give a damn for young men; a sarcastic girl who joked—(cruelly, unconscionably)—about those few boys who’d seemed to “like” her in high school. (Nothing so provoking of hoots of laughter as a stammered invitation Cressida had received from a boy in her advanced math class—a “fat slow slug” of a boy—to attend a school dance; or, invitations from girls perceived as even less popular than Cressida and Marcy, to have dinner at their houses, attend birthday parties, sleepovers.) Never would Cressida have confessed to Marcy how she felt about Brett Kincaid. Never hide her face in her hands, and weep—
Oh God! I want to die, I love him so much.
(Cressida liked it that, however inarticulately, shyly, and meekly—Marcy Meyer adored
her
. She did not scorn Marcy Meyer outwardly but could not take Marcy altogether seriously, as a consequence. Dismissing her closest friend to her parents—
Oh just Marcy! If nothing better comes up and I guess nothing better will, I’ll be seeing Marcy tonight
.)
Thrilled then, in her mean little charcoal-lump of a heart, to be deceiving Marcy. Who’d expected Cressida to stay after dinner, after cleanup in the kitchen—(with which Cressida helped, of course how could Cressida fail to help however bored by this time with the Meyer household)—and watch a DVD. But Cressida had said she couldn’t stay late, she was planning to get up early to run/hike and to work on a new set of ink drawings, seeing the disappointment in her friend’s face—“I’ll give you a call. Maybe we can do something next week.”
Thrilled to think she was going out to Wolf’s Head Lake. She, Cressida Mayfield!
Marcy had tried to insist, of course she wanted to drive Cressida home—“It’s Saturday night. Lots of people are out. You know—bikers, from out of town. I’ll drive you.”
“No thanks! I want to walk.”
“But, Cressie . . .”
Fuck Cressie! I am not your fucking Cressie don’t think it.
Suddenly irritable she’d repeated no thanks, she wanted to walk.
As if to say
Want to be alone. Have had enough of your bland banal boring conversation for one night.
Zeno had teased Cressida about making her (girl) friends cry. Since middle school Zeno had teased Cressida without seeming to realize, or to acknowledge, what it might mean if what he were teasing his daughter about were true.
Any girl has a crush on me, I will crush beneath my boots!
Don’t whine and blink at me, I’m not going to feel sorry for you.
And don’t call me “Cressie”—not so anyone can hear.
She’d said good night to Marcy and the others. Thanked them for a “wonderful dinner—as usual” and strode out the front walk as if propelled.
At last, free!
At last, she could breathe!
All evening she’d been thinking of Corporal Brett Kincaid. All day, all the previous night. Rehearsing how she would speak to him, and in what sort of voice.
Rehearsing what she’d say, hitching a ride out to Wolf’s Head Lake.
For it wasn’t so very unusual, if you didn’t have a car, or a ride.
At least, this was what Cressida had gathered. Easy to get a ride out, and a ride back, on a weekend night in summer.
Aged nineteen. Cressida Mayfield had not ever been at Wolf’s Head Lake at night.
Long she’d resented girls who’d been taken there, to the lakes, boating on the lakes and drinking parties, dancing at the lakeside taverns, Fourth of July fireworks. Miles away, back in Carthage, they’d seen how the sky at Wolf’s Head Lake had smoldered and brightened on the night of July Fourth and the sounds of detonations were like whiplashes in the flesh.