Joyce Oates - I’ll Take You There

My behavior surprised him-did it? He turned to stare at me as I prepared to leave him. At the door murmuring, softly, shyly so that the man might hear or not hear, as he wished, "Vernor, I love you. Good night."

I fled. I was partway down the outdoor stairs when I heard Vernor call after me in an undertone, protesting, "God damn you, girl, you do not love me. You do not know me ."

The sleeping man . His face wasn't one of repose but of torment, anguish. His forehead knotted, his mouth twisted into a grimace. The eyeballs moving beneath the shut lids. A quivering of his dark lustrous skin like a rippling in water. If I could see him as ugly, unattractive. If I could see him as unloved. I was a child bringing her fingertips to flame, inviting pain; daring pain; disbelieving pain. Trying to imagine my life without Vernor Matheius at its center. My life without loving him.

A hole in the heart through which the bleak cold of the universe might whistle through.

Strange to me, who stared at Vernor Matheius as he slept, on rare occasions when I was privileged to see him sleep, that there were others, Caucasians, a category of individuals to which in theory I belonged, who might gaze at Vernor Matheius in his unfathomable complexity and think merely Negro . And dismiss as Negro . What madness!

I came to believe that the unexamined life, the life that's led without continuous self-scrutiny, and a doubting of all inherited prejudice, bias, "faith," was madness. In our civilized lives we are surrounded by madness while believing ourselves enlightened.

In May of that year in our windswept northerly city there were cold driving rains like nails blown against flesh; the rush of happiness in the morning's sunshine would fade by midday when thunderheads gathered like artillery above Lake Ontario and moved south to spill themselves on our heads. Great bruised clouds swollen to bursting. The tumescence of nature. The bursting of nature. My lover's skin smoldered, infuriated. His eyes glancing away. He said I have no people, no parents, no brothers or sisters; I have no god; I have no home except in the mind. My thoughts are my home . And I asked Isn't it lonely there, Vernor ? And he said simply No. It's lonely here .

"Anellia! Let's examine this. You've told me that you pledged a 'sorority' "-the very word uttered with bemused disdain-"without knowing it discriminated against certain persons? Jews, 'Negroes'?"

It was an examination rough as sandpaper. Vernor Matheius rubbing sandpaper briskly and gloatingly on my bare skin.

I stared at my feet. At the ground. Brittle gravel mixed with mud. I tried to remember: had I known? What had I known? The individual who'd been myself the previous year, before Vernor Matheius, had become a stranger. I could not respect her, only just pity her in her ignorance. Softly I said, like a guilty child, "I would guess-I hadn't known."

"Hadn't known! How is that possible?"

How was it possible? My impetuous, infatuated, unexamined act.

"I-didn't think to know."

"There! You're approaching it, girl. You didn't think ."

And Vernor laughed heartily, shaking his head. A schoolteacher exasperated and delighted by his star pupil. As if his fingers were running over my body, tickling, if hurting; hurting just a little; and my body eager for this attention, as a puppy eager to be touched. This was Vernor Matheius in a playful mood. Vernor Matheius in his Socratic mood. (For all philosophers yearn to be Socrates, even those who dislike Socrates on principle, and have repudiated his bizarre metaphysics.) He loved it that Anellia who, so smart, such a smart little girl, should also be, frequently, so stupid.

Why had I confessed to him. My sordid Kappa past. My piteous Kappa past. Perhaps I'd wanted to amuse him by describing how I'd been voted out of the chapter almost unanimously-a single vote abstaining. (Whose vote? Never would I learn. Oh, that was unfair: unfair for me to be told such an astonishing fact, but no more.) I'd become deactivated from both the chapter and the national sisterhood of Kappa Gamma Pi. Telling Vernor of the experience, I didn't explain that I'd desperately petitioned for release; I'd been instructed how to proceed, sending letters to chapter officers and to the national executive board and to the Dean of Women (a powerful figure in such negotiations) explaining that I wanted to withdraw from the sorority. I could not explain to Vernor that I had never believed it was the fault of my Kappa sisters that I'd been such a failure, and so deeply unhappy, but my own fault; I was a freak in the midst of their stunning, stampeding, blazing female normality; if by magic I might have been transformed into a true Kappa, maybe in my desperation I'd have whispered-"Yes"? Still, they would not have released me for such a trifle as not fitting in. In my ignorance I'd signed documents I hadn't quite understood were legal contracts; I, who'd never signed such documents in my life and had glanced through these with misted-over eyes, scarcely pausing to read a line. To join a national sorority was a bold act binding one to financial obligations; this, I hadn't known. In my letters begging for release I'd explained that I was of Jewish ancestry and had f ailed to tell the truth about myself. I'd explained that I could not afford the sorority, and was already in debt for nearly three hundred dollars; under the irrefragable bylaws of the sorority I would have continued to be fined for missing meetings, I "would have continued to accumulate interest as a result of this debt, and yet I could not belong to the sorority or even attend the university without working during those hours when meetings were scheduled, and so on ad infinitum unless I was granted a legal release, or died.

Are you threatening suicide, I was asked in alarm.

And so they'd expelled me, unanimously. Except for a single mysterious abstaining vote I wished to think had been Dawn, who'd seduced me into the sorority with the hope (and it wasn't an unreasonable hope) that I would help raise the house's grade-point average.

Mrs. Thayer had been released from her contract, too. With rude expediency, immediately after the alumni reception.

I told Vernor Matheius nothing of Agnes Thayer. No longer did I think of Agnes Thayer.

Not truth but the uses to which we put truth. What is done, in the service of desire.

Walking to the Oneida Creek footbridge. It was a day for such a walk: even Vernor Matheius conceded. A strange mood, Vernor's mood. He'd had some good news, reported in the university newspaper; Vernor Matheius was one of four doctoral students awarded a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to complete his Ph.D. dissertation the following year; when I congratulated him, he frowned and looked away evasively; of course he was pleased, yet he didn't seem to approve of his pleasure; he had to examine the roots of such a small, craven pleasure; taking delight in mere professional, public "success"-something that had to do solely with "career" and not the pursuit of truth. Especially it embarrassed him that in the philosophy department the professors congratulated him and shook his hand as if such a fluke pleased them, too; and this forced him to reconsider his estimation of them. "Oh, Vernor," I said. "Please stop. This is an infinite regress."

He said, quite seriously, "It is. An infinite regress. Next week I'll be thirty years old."

I could not see the connection here. I could not tell him I'd assumed he was older.

This balmy May afternoon in the hills above the university Vernor had reverted to his playful mood. I'd grown to anticipate his shifts of mood: like the sky above Lake Ontario. He believed himself stable, unvarying, a personality like Kant's you could set a watch by, in his temperament if not in his behavior; he believed he was a man devoted sheerly to the intellect, like Wittgenstein. Yet he was volatile, mercurial as the most capricious of the Kappa girls. I was fearful of him. I adored him.