Joyce Oates - Sourland

Hearing this I felt a small stab of pleasure. Resenting as always the very syllable wife & certainly any thought of Tyrell’s wife until seeing now that this man was the prince of his household, very likely — the marriage, the family life, was centered upon him .

In any love-relationship there is the stronger person, & there is the weaker. There is the one who loves, & the one who is loved.

Loved, & therefore feared.

As often as he could come to me, he came. Arriving a half hour before the library closed. Or breathless & flush-faced arriving a scant five minutes before closing time. Sometimes Tyrell came directly from work — as he called it, without wishing to elaborate — as if the subject of his work in a family-owned local business was painful to him — & wore a sport coat or a suit, white shirt & necktie & black dress shoes like any professional man; at other times he wore corduroy trousers, the herringbone-tweed coat with leather elbow-patches, salt-stained running shoes.

Never did I look for the man. Never did I betray surprise or even (evident) pleasure glancing up & seeing the man looming over me with his tense tight smile, at the circulation desk.

There is the hunter , and there is the hunted .

Power resides not in the hunter — as you might think — but in the hunted .

In his hand a book as a prop. A book as a pretext. A book to be checked out of the Barnegat Public Library by the librarian at the circulation desk.

“Jane! Hello.”

It was not forbidden that Tyrell call me Jane . Many of the library patrons knew me & called me Jane .

It was not forbidden that Tyrell smile at me. Every patron known to me at the library was likely to smile at me.

It was forbidden that Tyrell touch me in public. Not even a handshake. Not even a brushing of his fingers against mine when I handed him back his plastic library card. Nor did I allow Tyrell to stare at me, in that way of his that was raw, ravenous. I had a horror of others knowing of us, or guessing. I had a horror of being talked-of, whispered-about .

Though it gave me a childish pleasure to lie in my bed in the early morning — amid my bedclothes tousled & rumpled from the man’s perspiring body of the previous night — & languidly to think yes probably others had noticed Tyrell lingering in my vicinity, or waiting for me when the library closed; very likely, some had seen us walking together on the deserted winter beach. Jane Erdley & that man — that tall man who comes into the library so much & is always hovering over her. The other librarians on the staff who are so sharp-eyed & our supervisor Mr. McCarren whose particular project Jane Erdley has been.

We are committed to hiring the disabled here, Ms. Erdley. This was the Barnegat mandate long before it was a directive of the State of New Jersey.

Oh thank you! Mr. McCarren that is so — kind.

I did not like it that others might wonder of us & gossip but I did like it that Tyrell revealed so plainly in his face the desire he felt for me. I liked it that the older, married man should be so reckless, desperate.

It pleased me perversely to think that he was the prince of his household. He was a man of thirty-seven who retained the youth & cruel naivete of a man a decade younger, or more — & so his maleness, his sexuality, withheld from the woman who was his wife, would aggrieve her. Not a syllable of reproach would pass the wife’s lips — so I imagined! — yet her hurt, her woundedness, her anxiety would be considerable. It is natural that a husband hold his wife in disdain, for she is his possession, available to him & known to him utterly as Jane Erdley would never be fully known.

Oh God! So beautiful.

Beneath the red plaid flannel skirt flared & short as a schoolgirl’s — beneath the schoolgirl white-woolen stockings worn with shiny red ankle-high boots — the (expensive, clumsy) prosthetic limbs: pink-plastic, with aluminum trim, lewd & ludicrous & to remove these, to unbuckle these, the man’s fingers trembling & the man’s face heated with desire, or dread — the first stage of the act of love — the act of sex-love — that will bind us, close as twins.

“Has there been any other —? Any other who — like this?”

“No. No one.”

“Am I the first?”

“Yes. The first.”

Seeing the look in the man’s face, the adoration in the man’s eyes I burst into laughter, it was not a malicious laughter but a child’s laughter of delight & playfulness & tears spilled from my eyes — a rarity for Jane Erdley does not cry even stricken with phantom-pain in her lower limbs — & I kissed the man hard on the lips as I had never kissed anyone in my life & I said, “Yes you are the first & you will always be the first.”

Throbbing veins & nerve-endings in the stumps. The stumps of what had once been my legs, my thighs — years ago in my old, lost life. Spidery red veins, thicker blue arteries deep inside the flesh. Where the stumps break off — where the amputation occurred — about six inches below the fine-curly-red-haired = of my groin — there is a delicious shiny near-transparent skin, an utterly poreless skin, onion-skin-thin, an infant’s skin; in wonderment you would want to stroke this skin, & lick it with your tongue yet in fact this skin isn’t only just soft but strangely sturdy, resilient — a kind of cuticle, a protective outer layer as of something shimmering & unspeakable.

“And you, Jane — you will always be my first.”

On Shore Island in his station wagon he kissed me. That first night shyly asking permission & several nights in succession I told him No — that isn’t a good idea & at last as he persisted I said Well — all right. But just once for the man knew that I would say Yes finally, from the first he’d known.

On Shore Island in my (small, sparely furnished) apartment he first kissed me there. Undressed me & unbuckled the plastic legs & kissed me many times there.

On Shore Island overlooking marshland: six-foot rushes that swayed & thrashed in the wind, a brackish odor of rotting things & at dawn a crazed choir of gulls, crows, marsh birds shrieking in derision, or in warning.

Kissing & sucking. For long delirious minutes that became half hours, & hours. Shivering & moaning & kissing/sucking the stumps, the soft infant-skin at the end of the stumps, so excited I could feel the blood rush into his penis, in my hand his penis was a kind of stump, immediately erect & smallish then filling out with blood leech-like filling with blood & hardening with blood & at last a hard yearning stump with a blunt blind soft head that seemed wondrous to me, so vulnerable & beautiful — a ludicrous thing, yet beautiful — as the stumps that are all that remain of my girl-legs are ludicrous, ugly & yet to this man’s eyes beautiful, as I am beautiful — the female torso, the upper limbs, the spread-open thighs, stump-thighs, & the openness between the thighs, moist & slash-like in the flesh, thrumming with heat & life & yearning — I will love you forever, there is no one like you my darling Jane you are so beautiful, my darling! Love love love love you — & in his delirium he seemed not to comprehend how I did not claim to love him.

For to be loved is to bask in your power, like a coiled snake sunning itself on a rock.

To love is weakness. This weakness must be overcome.

“I first saw you with some other women. I think they were your colleagues. The other librarians. You were walking into town” — this would be a distance of only a few blocks, on Holland Street leading into Barnegat Avenue where there is a very good inexpensive restaurant named Wheatsheaf — “you were laughing, & so beautiful — the braces just visible beneath your skirt shining, your crutches — the other women were just — so — ordinary — plain & heavy-footed — they were just walking. All the light was on you, & you were flying. Your beautiful shimmering-red hair, your beautiful face, all the light was on you & you seemed almost to be seeing me — taking note of me, & smiling — at me ! — you passed by so close on the sidewalk, I could have reached out & touched you…I felt faint, I stared after you, I had never seen anyone like you — beside you all other women are maimed, their legs are clumsy, their feet are ugly. I could have reached out & touched you…”