American Appetites Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my Princeton friends—

  nowhere in these pages

  THANKS

  My heartfelt thanks to friends for their expert advice in subjects crucial to this novel—Robert Morgenthau, Leigh Buchanan Bienen, Lynne Fagles, and Henry Bienen.

  EPIGRAPH

  Everything is entirely in Nature, and Nature is entire in everything. She has her center in every brute.

  —SCHOPENHAUER

  The center of gravity should be in two people: he and she.

  —CHEKHOV

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Thanks

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Creation of the World

  One

  Help

  The Evergreens’ Snowy Boughs

  Celebration

  Glass

  Two

  The Vigil

  The Police

  Three

  The Game

  The Indictment

  Motions

  Four

  The Trial

  Epilogue: The Verdict

  About the Author

  Also by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  THE CREATION OF THE WORLD

  They were young lovers, and married; and hand in hand, that first summer in Europe, they saw, among other inevitable sights, Michelangelo’s “Creation of the World” in the Sistine Chapel; and after an hour stumbled back out into the traffic-clogged streets of Rome, into the blinding midday sun, each with a mild headache and not much to say, but smiling, dazed: no longer hand in hand. Then one proposed lunch, for they were famished after a morning of sightseeing, and the other said, as if waking from a dream, Yes, I suppose that comes next.

  ONE

  HELP

  1.

  What is destiny—a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the seemingly benign verso of fate.

  He was a professional. He dealt in destinies, in the plural. Individuals’ lives transposed into data units, threaded into systems, made to yield equations that were, it might be said, complex statements of reduction, a paring not back or down but surgically inward, to the individual’s very essence—the statistic “self.” That such a self existed nowhere but in demographic charts did not render it any less real. Existence, Ian McCullough playfully argued, often before audiences, is a matter after all of how you define your terms.

  He was editor in chief of The Journal of International Politics and currently head of a five-year demographic study funded by the National Health Service, an investigation into the minute and mysterious correlations among age, employment, economic status, geographic mobility, illness, legal and/or criminal infractions, and death in a population mass of considerable size. He had long been a senior fellow of the prestigious Institute for Independent Research in the Social Sciences, Hazelton-on-Hudson, New York, and it was at the Institute he and his several associates and research assistants did their work of compiling, charting, graphing, predicting. Calibrating the diverse ways in which, so seemingly individual, the individual becomes a mathematical unit of a certain coherence—in a certain system, at least. In the system for which Ian J. McCullough had attained professional distinction, at least.

  Though he never admitted it in public, but spoke of it readily enough in private, to his friends, Ian had always thought it rather terrifying that unrelated individuals, wholly unaware of one another, nonetheless cooperated in a collective destiny. Was there any other human phenomenon more mysterious, in fact—and terrifying? So many residents of a delimited geographic space will, in a delimited period of time, die of heart disease, cancer, AIDS; be victims of robbery, theft, assault, arson, murder; commit crimes themselves; commit suicide. (Ian’s own father, with whom Ian had never been close, had drifted away from the family when Ian was a boy and was gone for years when news came of his death; and it was years later that Ian learned, accidentally, that his father had not died a “natural” death, not even an alcoholic’s “natural” death; he had committed suicide: had shot himself in the mouth with a borrowed .45-caliber revolver. The knowledge had made little impression on Ian, since by that time he had more or less forgotten his father, to the degree to which, he suspected, his father had forgotten him and the family.)

  Demography was not Ian McCullough’s first love; pure historical research (into nineteenth-century post—Civil War America) was his first love, and, as he had been telling his associates for years, he intended to return to it someday soon: as soon as he completed the study at hand, acquitted himself of his numerous professional responsibilities, broke free of certain commitments. (The Journal, for instance, would be particularly difficult to give up. Ian had raised it from its prior status as an exponential and footnote-laden academic publication with a modest circulation, mainly to university libraries, to its current status as a publication of far more general interest and some controversy, not only eagerly read by, but contributed to by, the most renowned specialists in the field.) My success is my problem, he said, and his friends laughed with him and agreed, for many of them were burdened with the same problem: they were, like Ian McCullough, successes “in their fields,” well into middle age yet “still youthful,” comfortably well off beyond all dreams and expectations of graduate-student days yet still “ambitious”—though ambitious for what, none could have said.

  Glynnis McCullough, Ian’s wife, a food expert and a compiler of regional and ethnic cookbooks of uncommon originality and pictorial beauty—for Glynnis so loved what she did, at least while she did it, she could not entrust the design of her books to others—believed that they were, all of them, hungry; that ambition was in fact hunger: very nearly visceral, physiological, “real.” And since hunger is nature, it is surely natural; isn’t it?

  The McCulloughs had one child, one surviving child, a daughter, Bianca, now nineteen years old. Another child, a boy, had died only a few days after birth, so many years ago now that Ian consoled himself with the possibility that the hurt and bitterness and inchoate rage that still rose in him at the memory, a rush of unwanted and even dreaded adrenaline in his veins, was factitious, and not genuine: what he believed, as a sonless father, he should feel, and not, fifteen years later, after all, what he did feel.

  For surely he was recovered from the shock and grief by now. As Glynnis gave every sign, and had done so for years, of being recovered. “Just don’t think about it, Ian,” she’d said. “Think of other things. There is a world, after all,” she’d said, smiling, “of other things.”

  But he was no longer young; he would be fifty years old in April, and this had something to do with it. Not compulsive thoughts but luxuriant thoughts. Of loss, grief, hurt, resentment.

  IN HIS OFFICE on the top floor of the Institute, Ian McCullough’s desk faced a large plate-glass window; he was not among the spartan-minded of his colleagues who insisted upon facing blank walls, out of a fear of being distracted from their work. And, yes, the view from Ian’s window, a fourth-floor window, was endlessly fascinating to him, beautiful, in all seasons and all weathers: birch trees, juniper, oaks; a small man-made lake that looked, in its contours and bank vegetation, utterly natural; a hilly landscape very rarely interrupted by human figures—the Institute parking lot was on the other side of the building, the province of junior faculty and the less prestigious. (When Ian invited a visitor into his office for the first time he never failed to remark, with an air of embarrassment or tacit apology, that he’d been assigned this office—which was in fact two large offices, with a co
nnecting door—because he had joined the Institute seventeen years ago, when such offices were more readily available; not because, in the notorious taxonomic structure of the Institute, he deserved it. His listeners bore him out, usually, in tolerant silence or regarded him with some perplexity. Did he not know who he was, or, knowing, did he not wish to acknowledge it? “The man’s very modesty is an example to us all,” Ian’s friend Denis Grinnell had several times said, “but it is not a good example.”)

  On the office walls, as a counterpoint to the mathematical abstraction and fineness of his work, and as a rebuke to the view outside his window, Ian had long ago hung a number of reproductions of woodcuts, engravings, watercolors—most of them by Dürer, for it was Dürer who had enthralled Ian in late adolescence, when one is so particularly susceptible to enthrallment. He had even imagined, and had been supported in his fantasy, at least to a degree, by Glynnis, the first young woman he had ever loved, that he bore some resemblance to Dürer’s great self-portrait: the watchful doubting eyes, the bony nose, the rather prim pursed lips: that look of self-critical intelligence, a shyly aggressive sort of skepticism. He had never outgrown Dürer though he’d outgrown his adolescent self; the woodcuts held a powerful fascination for him still: a fascination of dread, as much for the artist’s unsparing eye as for his allegorical imagination. “Not what the eye sees but what the mind imagines the eye must see,” Ian said of it. So, in his office, in a rare contemplative moment, he stared at the familiar images on the walls, the meticulously rendered folds in clothing, creases in brows, impacted data of grasses, melancholia, hair, fur, skulls, bones, living creatures in helpless thrall to the indecipherable drama of their times, and believed that Dürer had captured not madness but the mind’s triumph over madness. With no structure to contain it—no human design, system, strategy—such a flood of brute phenomena would have long ago drowned mankind. The very species would have gone under, become extinct.

  Ian had always been drawn in particular to an engraving of Death leading a handsome youth and a young girl on a horse: the two of them stare ahead, beyond the frame of the drawing, in hope, dread, wonder. In another, naked figures, evidently madmen, appear to be gamboling on rather knifelike spikes of grass. Their activity suggests both futility and dignity: since we are what we are, why not dance; why not dance . . . also?

  2.

  Out of nowhere the girl telephoned Ian, late one morning in February; and though he rarely took calls from parties who declined to identify themselves, and who insisted to his secretary, Mrs. Fairchild, that their calls were “of the greatest urgency,” Ian, already annoyed by a series of things that had gone wrong that day in the office, picked up the telephone and said, “Yes? What? Who is it?”

  He thought at first it must be a wrong number, the woman spoke so rapidly and so incoherently; he had to ask her name twice and then barely caught it. Sigrid? Sigrid Hunt? His wife’s friend Sigrid? He had never heard her voice over the telephone before and would not have recognized it; they had had only one conversation of any duration and substance together, and that some months ago. And if it were true—and perhaps it was true—that, from time to time, at odd unbidden moments, Ian found himself thinking of her, and sometimes mistaking other women for her—on the street, in friends’ homes, even in the corridors of the Institute, where, until recent years, there were few women at all apart from the secretarial staff—it was also true that he did not expect her, and did not much want her, in his life. For Glynnis after all seemed to have dropped her.

  In a breathless wavering voice Sigrid Hunt was telling Ian that she had to see him: she was desperate, hadn’t slept in several days, was convinced that something was going to happen to her, or had already happened. Ian interrupted several times to ask where she was—was she in danger, was she ill?—but Sigrid seemed scarcely to hear, saying that she had to talk to someone, had to talk to him, before it was too late. Ian said, “Are you alone? Is someone threatening you?” and she said, suddenly angered, “You don’t even know who I am, do you! You don’t remember me, do you! If I live or die, gutted like a fish, if somebody breaks in here and kills me, what does it matter to people like you!”

  “Sigrid, please—”

  “You and your wife, people like you!”

  “—are you in danger? Is somebody there?” Ian asked, suddenly rather frightened. “Where are you?”

  She began sobbing, panting harshly into the receiver, a warm moist desperate breath Ian could virtually feel. The last time he’d spoken with this young woman she had confided in him, half in worry, yet half, he’d thought, in pride, that she was involved in a love affair she couldn’t seem to “control”: formally engaged to a man, Egyptian-born, now living and working in the States, who was both “devoted” to her and “vindictive”; a man she loved very much, yet sometimes feared. Ian had had, only once, a brief encounter with this man, this rather exotic fiancé of Sigrid Hunt’s, in the McCulloughs’ house, in fact, at one of Glynnis’s large crowded parties. Ian retained only the vaguest image of a handsome, quite dark, unsmiling face that looked as if it had been carved out of stone. He could not recall having shaken the man’s hand.

  Now Sigrid was saying, sobbing, “You want me to beg, don’t you—you, all of you—” and Ian said, “Please don’t say such a thing; tell me where you are, what I can do for—” and Sigrid said, “Come or don’t come, what does it matter?”—her voice lifting in childlike despair even as it seemed to fall away from the receiver—“What does it matter?”

  Ian said, “Wait, Sigrid, let me check the address I have for you—”

  But the line was dead, a rebuke to his caution.

  EVEN AS HE made his decision, Ian McCullough thought, But why me? Why is this young woman calling me? And he had no answer, could think of absolutely no answer. But he was flattered, in his maleness. That was, he’d recall afterward, the primary, the shameful, the exhilarating thing.

  So he called Denis, to cancel out of their squash game and the editorial luncheon to follow, and he called his other colleagues, associate editors of the Journal, postponing the luncheon until later in the week: an emergency had come up, he said; he was terribly sorry to inconvenience them.

  One of the men asked if it was a family emergency, if there was anything he might do to help, and Ian replied, hurried, vague, wanting to get off the line, “Thanks so much, Art, but I don’t think so—not this time.”

  THERE ARE FINALLY only two categories of humanity in our social lives, as in Roman times there were Roman citizens and non-Roman: those whose names, addresses, and telephone numbers are carefully written into our address books, and those whose names, addresses, and telephone numbers are scribbled on tiny pieces of paper and inserted, with the expediency of the merely temporary, into our address books.

  Sigrid Hunt’s address was merely scribbled on a slip of paper and inserted into the tidy little book of permanent names and addresses Ian McCullough carried with him in his inside coat pocket. But how fortunate it was there at all! Ian studied it with singular intensity: Hunt, Sigrid. 119 Tice. Poughkeepsie, N.Y. No more than a half hour’s drive.

  Gutted like a fish. What, Ian wondered, had she meant by that?

  He left the Institute by a rear door, half ran to his car, set off. Glynnis was in New York that day and would not be home until early evening, but that had no bearing of course upon Ian’s errand.

  South along the Thruway, the familiar route made unnervingly strange by a sudden snowstorm that seemed to erupt out of the sun, the sky beyond a hard ceramic blue: painterly, pictorial. Ian recalled an improbable turquoise sky in an oil by—had it been Parmigianino, or one of the others, of that odd stylized era?—contemplated, indeed, stared at, that summer in Italy, he and Glynnis hand in hand, at times gripping each other in sheer ecstatic joy at what they saw, as, at night, in love, they gripped in the ecstasy of passion. Ian thought, I must get there, I must get there before it’s too late. Traffic on the Thruway was unexpectedly heavy.

&nbs
p; Ian had taken down Sigrid Hunt’s address back in November, a mild November day as he recalled, when the two of them had met, by chance, in Hazelton; Ian had dropped by the local crafts gallery, housed in a restored eighteenth-century mill, one of the several “historic” sites in the village, on an errand for Glynnis, and, returning to his car, dreamy, distracted, he’d happened to see Sigrid Hunt, or a young woman who closely resembled her, standing on a bank of the mill pond a short distance away. Ah, there, Ian thought, stopping dead in his tracks. There.

  A family of tourists were rather too exuberantly tossing bread and seed out onto the pond for the ornamental waterfowl, but this young woman stood alone, unmoving, staring at the flat mirrored surface of the water: like Milton’s Eve, contemplating her own mysterious reflection. She had not seen Ian but he had the uncanny feeling that she was waiting for him: knew he was there, knew he would see her, would come to her.

  Which of course he did. An unavoidable social gesture, he’d thought it.

  Ian’s wife, Glynnis, was notable for taking up and cultivating, and eventually dropping, miscellaneous people of one kind or another: often people rather vaguely “in the arts” or “promising”; frequently young women of varying degrees of attractiveness, unattached or mysterious in their attachments, appealingly vulnerable or merely vulnerable. Her “specimens,” certain of their friends called them, not without a degree of jealousy; and, indeed, it sometimes seemed to Ian that his wife collected individuals with the avidity of an old-time biologist, hauling in and examining and classifying species. Ian, whose energy was drained by his work, whose imagination floundered when confronted by the mere prospect of cultivating a new friend, envied Glynnis both her will and her ability; was not, on the face of it, jealous; yet one day he would ask, “Where is Iris?” or “Whatever became of—was her name Frances?—I haven’t seen her for months,” and Glynnis would look at him blankly for a moment, before remembering. At such times Ian felt a slight chill, wondering if, at the start, he had not been one of Glynnis’s specimens himself, which she had decided to keep.