LEAVE ME ALONE GOD DAMN YOU
by
In addition to being a respected novelist and story writer, playwright and essayist, Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She has won the National Book Award and is the 1994 recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement in Horror Fiction. She is the author, most recently, of Zombie, winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Novel, What I Lived For, nominated for the Pen/Faulkner Award, and First Love: A Gothic Tale. She has published three collections of her dark fiction: Night-Side, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, and Demon and Other Tales. Her short stories have appeared in Omni, Playboy, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The Atlantic, as well as in literary magazines and anthologies such as Architecture of Fear, Dark Forces, Metahorror, Little Deaths, Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex and Twists of the Tale: An Anthology of Cat Horror, and has had stories reprinted in Prize Stories: The O’Henry Awards and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She has recently edited the anthology American Gothic Tales.
Oates is prolific and fearless in her writing. She crosses genres with ease and is always receptive to a writing challenge. In this story she took my request for subtle and unusual motivation to heart – with this disturbing story the result.
We must repay both good
and ill – but not necessarily
to the one who did us the
good or ill.
Frederich Nietzsche
She was thirty-one. She was in control now. Her life was one of rules, prescriptions. The cardinal rule was Take care, take time! Patience, method, control. Waiting the necessary length of time (it might be less than a week, it might be as long as a month) required for the markings to heal.
Markings was the term she’d chosen, after some deliberation. She was a woman of principle, a woman of thought, a woman of shrewd premeditation. You don’t earn a PhD from Yale in a difficult, competitive, state-of-the-art field by being an emotional child.
Markings, not wounds. For they were a special language, a sacred text.
‘What a view! – beautiful.’
Like clockwork, that would be the first remark. A flattering exclamation.
Later would come the question, not overtly reproachful, not provocative exactly, yes but combative, sexually aggressive – ‘Are you happy here, alone?’
The man would have entered her apartment that was an airy white space floating above pine boughs. He’d come, anonymous but for his name, whatever his name, Bob, Keith, Dwight, Frank, at her invitation of course, the two of them pleasantly drunk, or at least they’d had a few glasses of wine, and were feeling excited, aroused. The man would be smiling, or she would be smiling. That baring-of-teeth, that signal of hope. And more than hope. The man would have glanced about her sparsely furnished living room, he might be standing out on her eleventh-floor balcony, he might even have another glass of wine in hand, a cigarette, looking at her frankly now, his smile a little harder, with that air that was sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle, of masculine reproach. Are you happy, here? Alone? A woman, alone?
Sometimes she laughed. What could you do but laugh. Leave me alone God damn you. Though smiling, giving a perfectly sensible answer: ‘Yes. Shouldn’t I be?’ Or, if she was feeling sexy, flirty: ‘Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Which is why I’ve invited you here.’ So that her visitor would get the point without being exactly sure what the point was.
The primary sexual organ: the mouth.
The primary sexual stimuli: the mouth’s utterances.
She was a linguist, a scientist of a kind. She looked upon the world as a place of species, specimens. The men whom she befriended, who came with her to her apartment, who were attracted to her, as she to them – what were they but specimens?
A man she would have met, for instance, in the museum café where she often went on free afternoons, a tall poised ashy-blonde woman in clothes of crisp neutral colours, sun-bleached, impeccably groomed, wearing dark glasses even in the building’s interior. Or she would have met him in one of the new bookstores, or in the atrium foyer of her bank. The connection would have been made between them, an exchange unpredictable except in retrospect. And some hours later, or a day later, a week, there he would be stepping into her perfectly proportioned airy space overlooking Lake Bellaire and the oddly shaped water tower a mile or so distant and he would smile in that way that might turn suddenly uneasy, doubtful, combative. He’d have gone to stand by the sliding glass door of her dining room, unless it was the identical door of her bedroom, perhaps he’d pushed the door open and gone outside to stand on the balcony shading his eyes, peering at the city miles away, and she would come up behind him as if their roles were reversed and he was leading the way, she forced to follow. In that way of mild quizzical reproach she’d grown to anticipate, both to dread and to hope for. Great place. Terrific view. But isolated, isn’t it? Are you happy here, alone?
Her markings were a kind of speech, of course. Sometimes a man warranted that kind of attention, most times not. She couldn’t judge beforehand. To one of them, one of the first here in Houston, she’d said, lifting her eyes in a smile, voice low, throaty, girlish as in flirtation, ‘Look, you can’t hurt me! I don’t love you yet.’ And he’d stared at her, uncomprehending. After a moment he’d laughed, uncertainly, as if wanting to think she’d been joking; mocking the conversation between a man and a woman that might have otherwise have occurred.
A (sexual) specimen merely. Not one of those she’d confronted with her markings.
How dare you judge me. Judge my life. Who are you to judge me. Who are you to run your eyes over me like your fingers grasping, poking, kneading, prying.
Who are you to dare, who has given you ascendency over me. Who has raised you like God in His firmament His wild white beard and glaring eyes and enormous dangling penis aloft in the clouds to pass judgment on my life, to find me guilty, guilty of shame. To punish.
She was a linguist by training. It was therefore her privilege to penetrate meaning’s surfaces, to expose secrets the way you crack a nut to expose its meaty interior. To decipher what lay within.
More difficult, more challenging was her own presentation of self. How to explain why she’d moved here, a Northerner from upstate Massachusetts, to this remote rural-suburban landscape of swampy bayous and high-rise condos, scrub pine and traffic-clogged interstate highways and ‘corporate-industrial parks’ south and west of Houston, Texas, not because she wanted to be alone – though of course she was alone – but because the job at the university here had seemed to her the most attractive, the most promising, the most challenging of the positions she’d been offered. And her apartment, on the eleventh floor of a sleek ivory-white stucco-and-glass building shaped like an upright iron, was the most attractive apartment building she’d seen that she could afford. In the distance the high-rise buildings and towers of Houston rose like dream-spires, now glaring in the white-hot sun, now fading in the humidity, dissolving in what sometimes appeared, at sunset, to be low-lying clouds, sweet-tasting orangy-toxic air. And close by was the lake that glittered like strips of glass, and spits of land where trees, shrubs, grasses grew in wild profusion. On the balcony you could not always distinguish, in raw gusts of wind, what was in fact toxic and what was purely natural – decaying vegetation, damp mucky earth, brackish water. Are you happy here, alone?
It required nearly an hour, sometimes longer, on the expressway, to get to the sprawling, opulent campus of the state university at which, with her PhD in linguistics, she taught advanced seminars to graduate students and one immense, open-enrolment course in ‘Arts of Communication’ – too many miles for her colleagues to be invited to visit her. Too far for her to travel back to the university area, after she’d driven home for the day. How isolated she was, like a princess in a tower. There was a former classmate from graduate school, a woman, in Dallas, but that was many hours away; they spoke on the phone occasionally and made vague promises about getting together soon. No, she had no relatives in the area, no one else she knew in the entire state of Texas.
So the question was a natural question, perhaps. Her answer was the riddle.
Sexual intercourse: a solution to the problem of communication.
She’d invented a wise European grandfather of peasant stock, yet educated too, somehow bookish, droll – he’d left a heritage of handy platitudes. Take care, take time! was one of his sayings. Strike first, strike best! was another. Or, Strike first, strike last! She believed he was a German grandfather. Yes, northern Germany. The region of Hamburg perhaps. A grandfather to whom she had no historical right. How shocked, how disbelieving, how hurt, furious her own family would have been if they’d known. It would have been hopeless to explain, and how could she explain? Better simply to outgrow them, their terrible dirt-dark memories. She would remain a kindly and dutiful daughter to them, at a distance.
Remember: patience. Even if she desired a man, even if she yearned to display her markings to him, she must wait until the exact, the perfect time. Take care, take time!
Since childhood she’d been highly sensitive to undercurrents of meaning in speech; since being trained as a linguist she’d made such subterranean meanings her speciality. She understood that meta-speech – the unconscious signals of facial expression, the body’s movements, or arrested movements, subtle alterations of voice, tone – are as significant as words themselves. Yet, maddeningly, in the presence of others, she could not ‘see’ herself, and could not imagine herself. As if I am blind and deaf, my powers taken from me. Sometimes in the midst of a lecture at the university she heard her own voice, throaty, confident, authoritative, saw rows of strangrs, some faces uplifted, others downturned to notebooks, and felt an instant’s panic Who is this person? How have I become her? yet the voice, the presence continued, unhesitating. Sometimes in the midst of a bright, chatty converstion with one of her male acquaintances, in those first heady, plunging minutes, she would hear herself speaking, not words but mere sounds, the melodic undercurrent Love me? Love me? Love me? love me?
In this year she’d moved to Houston, into the apartment floating above pine boughs at the edge of a glittering artificial lake, into an ivory-white stucco-and-glass building shaped like an upright iron, she’d brought several men home with her. If this was home, hadn’t she the right?
For shame, her mother whispered. She’d long forgotten the particulars, perhaps shame has no particulars and is always and ever the same: shame.
All of the men were strangers of course. Initially.
One of her cardinal rules was: Never a colleague. Never anyone who knows your name.
She’d learned, in graduate school. How unwise to become involved with a man you must see routinely afterwards, no avoiding his eyes, his frowning stare, his too-glib greetings. No avoiding his avoiding of you, a yet more painful alternative. So in the Houston area where no one knew her, there were men, attractive men, seemingly available men, in any case eager, alert men, men to be sexually aroused, men faceless in memory encountered in bookstores, at films, in the art museum with its stark white walls and airy skylights and earthen-hued terracotta floors in which she felt rather at home, like a work of art herself – she made little attempt to retain names and faces if they began to fade.
Except: one of them was a man she’d begun to care for, seriously. At first, as if in disguise, he’d seemed like any of the others she’d known in Houston or in the north. Yet he’d returned, she’d wanted to see him again. He began to telephone often. Abruptly, it seemed he was there.
How emotions rose swift and unnerving in her, and in him as well it seemed, if she could trust him, the symptoms. She’d been alarmed yet elated, like a child hesitating at the top of a giant slide. Should I? Dare I? Is there any turning back?
She was reminded of the final conference she’d had with her dissertation advisor, at Yale. Smiling at the confounded man with her lashless eyes, cruel-plucked eyebrows, a pimply rash she’d provoked on her throat with unconscious digging nails.
With this lover, however, she would not lose control. There would be nothing unconscious, unmeditated.
And he’d come back to her apartment with her, at her invitation. Seeing the isolation of the area, the part-built condos, millions of dollars of abandoned property close beside jealously guarded private residential villages, the Bellaire Yacht Club, the artificial lake glittering like a mirror laid flat, rippleless, the ugly water tower and the distant shimmering spires of the city unreal as paper cutouts and the starkness of her apartment, and – he had not asked the question. And the next morning, he had not asked. Nor the next time he came to see her. She was waiting, shrewdly waiting for Are you happy here, alone? and had prepared her answer, yet he did not ask. He’d asked other questions, for of course he inquired into her life, warm and curious and not too inquisitive, and she inquired into his life, keeping her tone casual and spontaneous, not wanting him to guess how eager she was to learn of him anything that might be hopeful, promising. (Yes he was divorced, and yes a child – an eight-year-old son. A hole in his heart, then, she supposed. Such holes impossible to mend.)
There was a spell of his not calling, or possibly she hadn’t answered his calls. And next time they met, on neutral ground, in a windswept plaza, he took her hand in a way he hadn’t before, and said, not accusing so much as pleading, yet angry, too, she felt the trembling anger beneath, ‘I don’t understand you. It’s as if there are two people inside you. The one I’m speaking with now, the one I know, or think I know – you. Then, when I leave you, the other seems to take control. She recalls our conversations wrongly. She distorts their meaning. She mishears words – if I’ve said, “I have to go home next weekend to visit my mother,” she will remember, “I want to go home next weekend to visit my mother.” She will remember my saying these words with a sneer, a look of defensiveness and reproach. She won’t have seen me, at all.’
Hearing these remarkable words, this amazing speech from one who was inclined to quiet, understatement, she was astonished; and could not think at first how to reply.
Wanting to cry No! No. There is no one in control but I.
She was frightened, but fortunately she was wearing very dark glasses, and a silk scarf tied loosely about her neck, fluttering in the wind like agitated fingers. She leaned up to him, kissed him lightly on the lips, yet in such a way he would know he’d been kissed on the lips, and said, ‘Well. We won’t let her anywhere near, then, will we?’
For shame, shame. Touching yourself. Even in the bath, it’s disgusting.
When does a child learn subterfuge? She’d asked the question, of course it was by now a much-rehearsed question, to her auditorium of undergraduates, many of them alert and attentive and smiling as they waved their hands or called out boldly – at the age of three? at the age of two? younger?
And what is the purpose of such subterfuge? she’d asked, quite enjoying her students’ responses, as if they were wholly on her side in this, children in league against prying, inquisitive elders.
Except: one morning she’d awakened from a confusion of dreams, dreams mixed with gale-force winds howling up from the Gulf of Mexico, and saw to her dismay and chagrin that she’d plucked out most of her eyelashes in the night, and so scratched at her throat there was a raw, inflamed rash beneath her jaw. And it was a Monday morning! Monday was her longest, most complicated and usually invigorating, exciting day at the university.
She became brisk, practical. She took charge. As if another, cruder person had wreaked damage that only she knew how to remedy. She did in fact have a drawer of emergency items, including false eyelashes, eyelashes not inordinately thick or conspicuously ‘glamorous’ but simply substitute lashes exactly the colour of her own. Of course, she owned attractive turtleneck sweaters. And a number of striking silk designer scarves, to tie carelessly about her neck.
Where? Well I don’t know exactly, Eastern Europe I suppose, I’m not the kind of person to dwell on the past, no family trees, genealogical mazes for me thanks! I was born in 1965. In the United States. The soil of Europe is soaked in blood – that’s not my continent, my continent is North America. Why look back, why dwell upon the past – no thanks! What a shame, dirty secrets. Actual dirt-filth, lice, rot. We were of a people slaughtered periodically by people in the next valley who spoke a different dialect, worshipped a different god. And the Nazis, the young German soldiers grinning and panting like dogs. There was a story told by the grandparents she hadn’t heard, she’d been shielded from by her parents so she hadn’t heard, it was simply not a story she knew. One of her relatives who’d hidden fleeing Jews, possibly Jews who’d been neighbours in Hungary near the Romanian border. And all of them fed alive to the Nazis’ starving dogs. But she hadn’t heard, and didn’t know, and in any case such a story could not be true.
In any case the family name had been changed. Her name had been changed. There was no connection, there was no history really. Her parents had shielded her from such knowledge and she hadn’t heard and didn’t know, no thanks!
In all places except one they were casual and spontaneous and made it a point to laugh together. Glancing at them, you would think they were lovers, attractive youngish people. Professional people. But when they were alone together in her apartment they were awkward, shy of speech. As if gravity had drawn them to the apartment, to the very place where speech was difficult. Their communication was touching, kissing. It was stroking, caressing, playfully nudging. It was frequently lovemaking – that solution, as she’d said wittily to her students upon more than one occasion, to the problem of conversation. He was a man who’d been a stranger initially and in many ways was a stranger even now, though she’d told him x, y, z about herself, carefully selected and rehearsed facts about herself, as she assumed the facts he told her about himself were similarly selected, rehearsed. She did not want to think that he might be speaking more directly to her than she to him, that he spoke from the heart, as the clumsy description had it. She did not want to think that he loved her, still less did she want to think she loved him unless in fact she understood that he did love her and that the terms of his love for her were not negotiable but absolute, fixed.
Yet she had the uneasy sense, which she’d never had before with any man, that she’d already loved him, this stranger, sometime in the past, and that her feeling for him now was a kind of remembering. It isn’t possible, you know it. Is it possible?
There was the sense that she had no choice about it, her feeling for him. That somehow it had been decided for her. And he, too, knew. Yet could not speak of it, for the words were lacking.
What frightened her: how their dreams meshed.
Confused like their limbs luxuriantly tangled together in the aftermath of lovemaking. That torpor that becomes, by such slow degrees you cannot discern one moment from the other, a deep, physically embroiling sleep. And she was in terror that, penetrating her dreams, he would penetrate certain secrets of hers. He knew her name – the name her family had acquired, in the United States. Yet perhaps he knew her true, her original name, as well.
She trusted him with too much. She couldn’t trust him!
Waking one morning after a few hours of fitful sleep, love confused with dreams, disjointed windswept dreams, his physical weight, warmth, presence, pressure like a wall against which she’d pressed, and abruptly she was alone – he’d slipped out of bed, in stealth it seemed, for perhaps he, too, had been feeling the terror of their closeness, and there he was standing out on her balcony, the sliding glass open by several inches so a chilly-misty wind eased through. It was not yet dawn: not six a.m.: silent except for the wind. She followed the man out on to the balcony, disguising her anxiety, smiling, brushing her hair from her face, calling out in a pretence of boldness, intimacy, ‘What on earth are you doing out here? – it’s so early. It’s cold.’ And he didn’t turn to her, smiling, to embrace her, to shield her from the cold. At another time he would have done so, without a moment’s hesitation, yet he did not, now. And the wind was out of the east, bearing that sharp gassy odour she dreaded. And the sky was mottled and grey as broken concrete. And the dream city was obscured in mist, or fog, almost invisible. And this man who’d shared her bed but was clearly a stranger, her lover of several months but a stranger, stood leaning on the railing, squinting towards the lake without at first acknowledging her presence even as she stroked his shoulders and the tense muscles of his back through the thin fabric of his T-shirt – he wore undershorts, T-shirts to bed instead of pyjamas, when he didn’t sleep naked. And finally he turned to her, and asked, as if it were a question he’d been pondering for a long time, ‘Why are you here, exactly?’ and she was so startled she could not speak at first, she’d begun to shiver yet felt the heat rise in her face as if she’d been slapped, trying then awkwardly to make a joke, ‘Here? – because you’re here, I suppose.’ He’d taken hold of her hands as if to stop their nervous caressing of his body, and he asked, ‘I mean, why are you in Houston, why here?’ and in that instant she understood that he did not love her but perhaps pitied her; she saw her apartment, the view from her eleventh-floor balcony, through his critical, assessing eyes; she saw herself through his eyes – an anxiously smiling woman of thirty-one, an attractive woman whose youth was behind her, bare-legged, barefoot, making a pretence of gaiety in this gritty-grey air, dishevelled blonde-brown hair blown by the wind. There was a glare that seemed to emanate from the massed clouds and the steely, unreflective surface of the lake. The air tasted of metallic cold.
She turned from him, ran back into the bedroom and into the bathroom, shutting the door, locking it.
She’d known, of course. It was time.
For an hour then, perplexed, alarmed, he’d rapped on the door, pleaded with her. Spoke her name, and certain words – honey, darling – their intimate names for each other, rarely uttered aloud, and never before in such a tone. He asked what on earth was wrong? What had he said to upset her? Why wouldn’t she unlock the door? Please would she unlock the door? He loved her, he was sorry, please would she unlock the door? But she held her ground, and did not weaken. She was crying softly to herself, inaudibly. Bitter salt tears she loved. How familiar to her the taste, and delicious. Until at last in the midst of the man’s pleading, his veiled threat to call for help, to get someone to take the door off its hinges, she unlocked it, threw it open so he could see, staring in astonishment, her handiwork: the quick-feathery brightly bleeding slashes in her pearly skin, across her pear-sized hard breasts, even the nipples oozing blood, you see I am serious, I don’t stint on pain. She’d employed several fresh razors, her slender fingers trembling yet skilled in the execution of such markings, such a beautiful mysterious language, this man had never seen before nor would ever see again. Her narrow ribcage, her breastbone, the smooth-healed soft skin of her abdomen and belly and thighs, a number of the scratches slick with blood, others scarcely more than hairline cracks in her flesh, almost invisible; tufts of her wheat-coloured kinky-damp pubic hair she’d torn out in derision, and the flesh there was starkly pale and beaded with blood like tiny jewels. The man had stepped back as if struck in the chest, he was murmuring what sounded like My God! Oh no! and may have said more, staring and incredulous as, triumphant, she advanced upon him, naked, shining, forcing him back, hands on her hips, jeering, as he could never have imagined her.
Crying, ‘Leave me alone God damn you!’
Alone, alone – the syllables echoed faintly. Though in fact the apartment was empty, he’d gone away, fled like the others, and there was only the thin cold sound of the wind, the wind from the east, through the partly opened glass door.