Joyce Oates: Sourland

So adamant, Hadley had no choice but to give in.

And no choice except to invite Anton Kruppe inside, for just a while.

Politely and with regret explaining that she had a dinner engagement, later that evening. But would he come inside, for a drink?

“Hedley yes thank you! I would like — yes so much.”

Stammering with gratitude Anton scraped his hiking boots against the welcome mat. The soles were muddy and stuck with leaves. Though Hadley insisted it wasn’t necessary Anton removed the boots with a grunt and left them on the front step carefully placed side by side. What large boots they were, like a horse’s hooves! The sodden shoelaces trailed out — left, right — in perfect symmetry.

Inside, most of the downstairs rooms were dark. Now it was late October night came quickly. Pleasantly excited, a little nervous, Hadley went about switching on lights. There was a curious intimacy between her and Anton Kruppe, in this matter of switching on lights. Hadley heard her voice warmly uplifted — no idea what she was saying — as her tall lanky guest in his stocking feet — soiled-looking gray wool socks — came to stand at the threshold of the living room — stared into the interior of the long beautifully furnished living room with a shoulder-high stone fireplace at its farther end, book-filled shelves, Chinese carpets on a gleaming hardwood floor. Above the fireplace was a six-by-eight impressionist New England landscape of gorgeous pastel colors that drew the eye to it, as in a vortex.

Excitedly Anton Kruppe asked — was the painting by Cezanne?

“‘Cezanne’! Hardly.”

Hadley laughed, the question was so naïve. Except for surreal pastel colors and a high degree of abstraction in the rendering of massed tree trunks and foliage, there was little in the Wolf Kahn canvas to suggest the earlier, great artist.

Outside, while Anton changed the floodlight, Hadley had been thinking I will offer him coffee. That’s enough for tonight. But now that they were out of the October chill and inside the warm house it was a drink — wine — she offered him: a glass of dark red Catena wine, from a bottle originally purchased by her husband. Anton thanked her profusely calling her “Hedley” — a flush of pleasure rose into his odd, angular face. In his wiry hair that was the color of ditch water a small pumpkin seed shone.

Hadley poured herself a half-glass of wine. Her hand shook just slightly. She thought If I don’t offer him a second glass. If I don’t ask him to stay.

Since there was an opened jar of Brazilian nuts on the sideboard, Hadley offered these to Anton, too. A cascade of nuts into a blue-ceramic bowl.

Gratefully Anton drank, and Anton ate. Thirstily, hungrily. Drifting about Hadley’s living room peering at her bookshelves, in his gray wool socks. Excitedly he talked — he had so much to say! — reminding Hadley of a chattering bird — a large endearingly gawky bird like an ostrich — long-legged, long-necked, with a beaky face, quick-darting inquisitive eyes. So sharply his hair receded from his forehead, it resembled some sort of garden implement — a hand trowel? — and his upper body, now he’d removed his nylon parka, was bony, concave. Hadley thought He would be waxy-pale, beneath. A hairless chest. A little potbelly, and spindly legs.

Hadley laughed. Already she’d drunk half her glass of wine. A warm sensation suffused her throat and in the region of her heart.

Politely Hadley tried to listen — to concentrate — as her eccentric guest chattered rapidly and nervously and with an air of schoolboy enthusiasm. How annoying Anton was! Like many shy people once he began talking he seemed not to know how to stop; he lacked the social sleight of hand of changing the subject; he had no idea how to engage another in conversation. Like a runaway vehicle down a hill he plunged on, head-on, heedless. And yet, there was undeniably something attractive about him.

More incensed now, impassioned — though he seemed to be joking, too — speaking of American politics, American pop culture, “American fundamentist ignorance” about stem-cell research. And how ignorant, more than ninety percent of Americans believed in God — and in the devil.

Hadley frowned at this. Ninety percent? Was this so? It didn’t seem plausible that as many people would believe in the devil, as believed in God.

“Yes, yes! To believe in the Christian God is to believe in His enemy — the devil. That is known.”

With his newfound vehemence Anton drained his glass of the dark red Catena wine and bluntly asked of his hostess if he might have more? — helping himself at the sideboard to a second, full glass and scooping up another handful of the Brazilian nuts. Hadley wondered if he meant to be rude — or simply didn’t know better. “I can’t really think,” she persisted, “that as many Americans believe in the devil, as believe in God. I’m sure that isn’t so. Americans are — we are — a tolerant nation…”

How smug this sounded. Hadley paused not knowing what she meant to say. The feral-dark wine had gone quickly to her head.

With a snort of derision Anton said, “‘A tolerant nation’ — is it? Such ‘tolerance’ as swallows up and what it cannot, it makes of an enemy.”

“‘Enemy’? What do you mean?”

“It makes of war. First is declared the enemy , then the war. ”

Anton laughed harshly, baring his teeth. Chunky yellow teeth they were, and the gums pale-pink. Seeing how Hadley stared at him he said, in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “First there is the ‘tolerance’ — then, the ‘pre-empt strike.’”

Hadley’s face flushed with the heat of indignation. This was insulting — it had to be deliberate — Anton Kruppe who’d lived in the United States for much of his life knew very well the history of the Iraq War, how Americans were misled, deceived by the Republican leadership. Of course he knew. She opened her mouth to protest bitterly then thought better of it.

Surreptitiously she glanced at her wristwatch. Only 6:48 P.M.! Her guest had been inside the house less than a half hour but the strain of his visit was such, it seemed much longer.

Still Anton was prowling about, staring. Artifacts from trips Hadley and her husband had taken, over the years — Indonesian pottery, African masks, urns, wall hangings, Chinese wall scrolls and watercolors, beautifully carved wooden figures from Bali. A wall of brightly colored “primitive” paintings from Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala. Yet more, the books on Hadley’s shelves seemed to intrigue Anton, as if these hundreds of titles acquired years ago, if not decades ago, mostly by Hadley’s husband who’d earned both a Ph.D. in European history and a law degree from Columbia University, possessed an immediate, singular significance and were not rather relics of a lost and irretrievable private past.

“You have read all these, Hedley — yes?”

Hadley laughed, embarrassed. No, she had not.

“Then — someone else? All these?”

Hadley laughed again, uncertain. Was Anton Kruppe mocking her? She felt a slight repugnance for the man, who peered at her, as at her art-objects and bookshelves, with an almost hostile intensity; yet she could not help it, so American was her nature, so female, she was anxious that he should like her, and admire her — if that could be settled, she would send him away, in triumph.

Remembering the foreign-born children at her schools. In middle school they had seemed pitiful, objects of sympathy, charity, and condescension, if not derision; in high school, overnight it seemed they’d become A-students, star athletes. A drivenness to them, the complacent Americans had mistaken initially as weakness.