American Appetites

For my Princeton friends
—
nowhere in these pages

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.

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

—S
CHOPENHAUER

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

—C
HEKHOV

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

T
hey 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.

1.

W
hat 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 connecting 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!”