Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007

Valentine, July Heat Wave by Joyce Carol Oates

© 2007 by Joyce Carol Oates

A National Book Award winner and a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of many important literary novels, and short-story and poetry collections. She has also become a notable contributor to crime fiction in recent years. Her second collection of crime stories, The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, is due from Harcourt in August. She’s also got a new novel due in June. See The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco).

By calculated estimate is Eight days should be about right.

Not that I am a pathologist, or any kind of “naturalist.” My title at the university is professor of humanities. Yet a little research has made me fairly confident Eight days during this heat should be about right.

Because I have loved you, I will not cease to love you. It is not my way (as I believe you must know) to alter. As you vowed to be my wife, I vowed to be your husband. There can be no alteration of such vows. This, you know.

You will return to our house, you will return to our bedroom. When I beckon you inside you will step inside. When I beckon you to me you will come to me. You will judge if my estimate has been correct.

Eight days! My valentine.

The paradox is: Love is a live thing, and live things must die.

Sometimes abruptly, and sometimes over time.

Live things lose life: vitality, animation, the pulse of a beating heart and coursing blood carrying oxygen to the brain, the ability to withstand invasion by predatory organisms that devour them. Live things become, in the most elemental, crudest way of speaking, dead things.

And yet, the paradox remains: In the very body of death, in the very corpse of love, an astonishing new life breeds.

This valentine I have prepared for you, out of the very body of love.

You will arrive at the house alone, for that is your promise. Though you have ceased to love me (as you claim) you have not ceased to be an individual of integrity and so I know that you would not violate that promise. I believe you when you’ve claimed that there is no other man in your life: no other “love.” And so, you will return to our house alone.

Your flight from Denver is due to arrive at 3:22 P.M. You’ve asked me not to meet you at the airport and so I have honored that wish. You’ve said that you prefer to rent a car at the airport and drive to the house by yourself and after you have emptied your closets, drawers, shelves of those items of yours you care to take away with you, you prefer to drive away alone, and to spend the night at an airport hotel where you’ve made a reservation. (Eight days ago when I called every airport hotel and motel to see if you’d made the reservation yet, you had not. At least, not under your married name.) When you arrive at the house, you will not turn into the driveway but park on the street. You will stare at the house. You will feel very tired. You will feel like a woman in a trance of — what?

Guilt, surely. Dread. That sick sense of imminent justice when we realize we must be punished, we will get what we “deserve.”

Or maybe you will simply think: Within the hour it will be ended. At last, I will be free!

Sometime before 4 P.M. you will arrive at the house, assuming the flight from Denver isn’t delayed. You had not known you were flying into a Midwestern heat wave and now you are reluctant to leave the air-conditioned interior of the car. For five weeks you’ve been away and now, staring at the house set back some distance from the street, amid tall, aging oaks and evergreens, you will wish to think Nothing seems to have changed. As if you have not noticed that, at the windows, downstairs and upstairs, venetian blinds seem to have been drawn tightly shut. As if you have not noticed that the grass in the front lawn is overgrown and gone to seed and in the glaring heat of the summer sun patches of lawn have begun to burn out.

On the flagstone walk leading to the front door, a scattering of newspapers, fliers. The mailbox is stuffed with mail no one seems to have taken in for several days though you will not have registered Eight days! at this time.

Perhaps by this time you will concede that, yes, you are feeling uneasy. Guilty, and uneasy.

Knowing how particular your husband is about such things as the maintenance of the house and grounds: the maintenance of neatness, orderliness. The exterior of the house no less than the interior. Recognizing that appearances are trivial, and yet: Appearances can be signals that a fundamental principle of order has been violated.

At the margins of order is anarchy. What is anarchy but brute stupidity!

And so, seeing uneasily that the house seems to be showing signs of neglect, quickly you wish to tell yourself But it can have nothing to do with me! Five weeks you’ve been away and only twice, each time briefly, you have called me, and spoken with me. Pleading with me Let me go, please let me go as if I, of all people, required pleading-with.

My valentine! My love.

You will have seen: my car parked in the driveway, beside the house. And so you know (with a sinking heart? with a thrill of anticipation?) that I am home. (For I might have departed, as sometimes, admittedly, in our marriage I did depart, to work in my office at the university for long, utterly absorbed and delirious hours, with no awareness of time.) Not only is the car in the driveway, but I have promised you that I would be here, at this time; that we might make our final arrangements together, preparatory to divorce.

The car in the driveway is in fact “our” car. As the house is “our” house. For our property is jointly owned. Though you brought no financial resources to our marriage and it has been entirely my university income that has supported us yet our property is jointly owned, for this was my wish.

As you are my wife, so I am your husband. Symmetry, sanctity.

This valentine I’ve designed for you, in homage to the sanctity of marriage.

On the drive from the airport, you will have had time to think: to rehearse. You will repeat what you’ve told me and I will try to appeal to you to change your mind but of course you will not change your mind Can’t return, not for more than an hour for that is the point of your returning: to go away again. You are adamant, you have made up your mind. So sorry please forgive if you can you are genuine in your regret and yet adamant.

The house, our house: 119 Worth Avenue. Five years ago when we were first married you’d thought that this house was “beautiful” — “special.” Like the old residential neighborhood of similarly large houses on wooded lots, built on a hill overlooking the university arboretum. In this neighborhood known as University Heights most of the houses are solidly built brick with here and there a sprawling white colonial, dating back to the early decades of the twentieth century. Our house is dark-red brick and stucco, two stories and a third part-story between steep shingled roofs. Perhaps it is not a beautiful house but certainly it is an attractive, dignified house with black shutters, leaded-glass windows, a screened veranda, and lifting from the right-hand front corner of the second floor a quaint Victorian structure like a turret. You’d hurried to see this room when the real-estate agent showed us the house but were disappointed when it turned out to be little more than an architectural ornament, impractical even as a child’s bedroom.

On the phone you’d murmured Thank God no children.

Since you’ve turned off the car’s motor, the air conditioning has ceased and you will begin to feel a prickling of heat. As if a gigantic breath is being exhaled that is warm, stale, humid, and will envelop you.

So proud of your promotion, Daryll. So young!

How you embarrassed me in the presence of others. How in your sweetly oblivious way you insulted me. Of course you had no idea. Of course you meant well. As if the fact that I was the youngest “senior” professor in the humanities division of the university at the time of my promotion was a matter of significance to me.

As my special field is Philosophy of Mind so it’s “mind” that is valued, not trivial attributes like age, personality. All of philosophy is an effort of the mental faculties to discriminate between the trivial and the profound, the fleeting and the permanent, the many and the One. Pride is not only to be rejected on an ethical basis but on an epistemological basis, for how to “take pride” in one’s self? — in one’s physical being, in which the brain is encased? (Brain being the mysterious yet clearly organic repository of “mind.”) And how to “take pride” in what is surely no more than an accident of birth?

You spoke impulsively, you had no idea of the crudeness of your words. Though in naiveté there is a kind of subtle aggression. Your artless blunders made me wince in the presence of my older colleagues (for whom references to youth, as to age, were surely unwelcome) and in the presence of my family (who disapproved of my marrying you, not on the grounds that you were too young, but that you were but a departmental secretary, “no match” intellectually for me which provoked me to a rare, stinging reply But who would be an intellectual match for me? Who, and also female?)

Yet I never blamed you. I never accused you. Perhaps in my reticence. My silences. My long interludes of utter absorption in my work. Never did I speak of the flaws of your character and if I speak of them now it is belatedly and without condemnation. Almost, with a kind of nostalgia. A kind of melancholy affection. Though you came to believe that I was “judgmental” — “hypercritical” — truly you had no idea how I spared you. Many times.

Here is the first shock: the heat.

As you leave the car, headed up the flagstone path to the front door. This wall of heat, waves of heat shimmering and nearly visible rushing at you. “Oh! My God.” Several weeks away in mile-high Denver have lulled you into forgetting what a midsummer heat wave in this sea-level Midwestern city can be.

Stale humid heat. Like a cloud of heavy, inert gas.

The heat of my wrath. The heat of my hurt. As you are my wife I spared you, rarely did I speak harshly to you even when you seemed to lose all control and screamed at me Let me go! Let me go! I am sorry I never loved you please let me go!

That hour, the first time I saw your face so stricken with repugnance for me. Always, I will remember that hour.

As if, for the five years of our cohabitation, you’d been in disguise, you’d been playing a role, and now, abruptly and without warning, as if you hadn’t known what you would say as you began to scream at me, you’d cast aside the disguise, tore off the mask and confronted me. Don’t love you. It was a mistake. Can’t stay here. Can’t breathe. Let me go!

I was stunned. I had never imagined such words. I saw your mouth moving, I heard not words but sounds, strangulated sounds, you backed away from me, your face was contorted with dislike.

I told you then: I could not let you go. Would not let you go. For how could I, you are my wife.

Remembering how on a snowy morning some months before, in late winter, you’d entered my study in my absence and propped up a valentine on the window sill facing my desk. For often you did such things, playful, childlike, not seeming to mind if I scarcely noticed, or, noticing, paid much attention. The valentine came in a bright red envelope, absorbed in my work somehow I hadn’t noticed. Days passed and I did not notice (evidently) and at last you came into my study to open the envelope for me laughing in your light rippling way (that did not sound accusing, only perhaps just slightly wounded) and you drew out of the red envelope a card of a kind that might be given to a child, a kitten peeking out of a watering can and inside a bright red TO MY VALENTINE. And your name. And I stared at this card not seeming to grasp for a moment what it was, a “valentine,” thrust into my face for me to admire.

Perhaps I was abrupt with you then. Or perhaps I simply turned away. Whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent. The maddened buzzing of flies is a kind of silence, I think. Like all of nature: the blind devouring force to which Schopenhauer gave the name will.

Your promise was, at the time of our marriage, you would not be hurt. You would not be jealous of my work, though knowing that my work, as it is the best part of me, must always take priority over my personal life. Freely you’d given this promise, if perhaps recklessly. You would not be jealous of my life apart from you, and you would not be hurt. Bravely pledging I can love enough for both of us!

And yet, you never grasped the most elemental logistics of my work. The most elemental principles of philosophy: the quest for truth. Of course, I hardly expected you, lacking even a bachelor’s degree from a mediocre land-grant university, to understand my work which is understood by very few in my profession, but I did expect you, as my wife, to understand that there can be no work more exacting, exhausting, and heroic.

But now we are beyond even broken promises. Inside our house, your valentine is waiting.

As a younger man only just embarked upon the quest of truth, I’d imagined that the great work of my life would be a definitive refutation of Descartes, who so bluntly separated “mind” and “body” at the very start of modern philosophy, but unexpectedly in my early thirties my most original work has become a corroboration and a clarification of the Cartesian position: that “mind” inhabits “body” but is not subsumed in “body.” For the principles of logic, as I have demonstrated by logical argument, in a systematic geometry in the mode of Spinoza, transcend all merely “bodily” limitations. All this, transmuted into the most precise symbols.

When love dies, can it be revived? We will see.

On the front stoop you will ring the doorbell. Like any visitor.

Not wishing to enter the house by the side door, as you’d done when you lived here.

Calling in a low voice my name: “Daryll?”

How strange, Daryll is my name. My given name. Yet I am hardly identical with Daryll and in the language of logic it might even be claimed that I am no thing that is Daryll though I am simultaneously no thing that is not-Daryll. Rather, Daryll is irrelevant to what I am, or what I have become.

No answer. You will try the door knocker. And no answer.

How quiet! Almost, you might think that no one is home.

You will take out your house key, carried inside your wallet, in your purse. Fitting the key into the lock you will experience a moment’s vertigo, wishing to think that the key no longer fits the lock; that your furious husband has changed the locks on the doors, and expelled you from his life, as you wish to be expelled from his life. But no, the lock does fit. Of course.

Pushing open the door. A heavy oak door, painted black.

Unconsciously you will have expected the interior of the stolid old dark-brick house to be coolly air-conditioned and so the shock of over-warm, stale air, a rancid-smelling air seems to strike you full in the face. “Hello? Daryll? Are you…”

How weak and faltering, your voice in your own ears. And how your nostrils are pinching at this strange, unexpected smell.

Rancid-ripe. Sweet as rotted fruit, yet more virulent. Rotted flesh?

Please forgive!

Can’t return. Not for more than an hour.

It was my fault, I had no idea…

…from the start, I think I knew. What a mistake we’d both made.

Yes I admit: I was flattered.

…young, and ignorant. And vain.

That you, the most brilliant of the younger professors in the department…

Tried to love you. To be a wife to you. But…

Just to pack my things. And what I can’t take with me, you can give to Goodwill. Or throw out with the trash.

…the way they spoke of you, in the department. Your integrity, your genius. And stubborn, and strong…

If I’d known more! More about men. Like you I was shy, I’d been afraid of men, I think. A virgin at twenty-five…

No. I don’t think so.

Even at the beginning, no. Looking back at it now, I don’t think I ever did, Daryll. It was a kind of…

…like a masquerade, a pretense. When you said you thought you loved me. Wanting so badly to believe…

Please, Daryll? Can you? Forgive?

…only just time enough to pack a few things. The divorce can be finalized by our lawyers, we won’t need to meet again.

The most brilliant young philosopher of his generation, they said of you. And he is ours…

This masquerade. “Marriage.”

So badly I wanted to be your wife. I am so ashamed!

Daryll? Can you forgive me?

Standing in the doorway of the living room you will see to your astonishment that sheets — bedsheets? — have been carefully drawn over the furniture, like shrouds. One of the smaller Oriental rugs has been rolled up and secured with twine as if in preparation for being hauled away. Books have been removed from the shelves that cover most of two walls of the living room and these books have been neatly placed in cardboard boxes. At the windows, blinds have been tightly drawn shut. Flies buzz and bat against the slats. There’s a green twilit cast to the air as if the house has sunk beneath the surface of the sea.

The smell: What is it? You think Something that has spoiled, in the kitchen?

You will not venture into the kitchen at the rear of the house.

Though you enter the dining room, hesitantly. Seeing on the long oaken table a row of manila folders each neatly marked in black ink: FINANCES, BANK RECORDS, IRS & RECEIPTS, LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.

You will begin now to be frightened. Panic like flames begins to lick at you.

And that sound: murmurous and buzzing as of muffled voices behind a shut door.

“Daryll? Are you — upstairs?”

Telling yourself Run! Escape!

Not too late. Turn back. Hurry!

Yet somehow you will make your way to the stairs. The broad front staircase with the dark-cranberry carpeting, worn in the center from years of footsteps predating your own. Like a sleepwalker you grip the banister, to steady your climb.

Is it guilt drawing you upstairs? A sick, excited sense of what you will discover? What it is your duty, as my wife, to discover?

You will be smiling, a small fixed smile. Your eyes opened wide yet glassy as if unseeing. And your heart rapidly beating as the wings of a trapped bird.

If you faint… Must not faint! Blood is draining from your brain, almost you can feel darkness encroaching at the edges of your vision; and your vision is narrowing, like a tunnel.

At the top of the stairs you pause, to clear your head. Except you can’t seem to clear your head. Here, the smell is very strong. A smell confused with heat, shimmering waves of heat. You begin to gag, you feel nausea. Yet you can’t turn back, you must make your way to the bedroom at the end of the corridor.

Past the charming little turret-room with the bay window and cushioned window seat. The room you’d imagined might somehow have been yours, or a child’s room, but which proved to be impracticably small.

The door to the bedroom is shut. You press the flat of your hand against it feeling its heat. Even now thinking almost calmly No. I will not. I am strong enough to resist.

You dare to grasp the doorknob. Dare to open the door. Slowly.

How loud the buzzing is! A crackling sound like flame. And the rancid-rot smell, overwhelming as sound that is deafening, passing beyond your capacity to comprehend.

Something brushes against your face. Lips, eyes. You wave it away, panicked. “Daryll? Are you — here?”

For there is motion in the room. A plane of something shifting, fluid, alive and iridescent-glittering: yet not human.

In the master bedroom, too, venetian blinds have been drawn at every window. There’s the greeny undersea light. It takes you several seconds to realize that the room is covered in flies. The buzzing noise you’ve been hearing is flies. Thousands, millions? — flies covering the ceiling, the walls. And the carpet, which appears to be badly stained with something dark. And on the bed, a handsome four-poster bed that came with the house, a Victorian antique, there is a seething blanket of flies over a humanoid figure that seems to have partly melted into the bedclothes. Is this — who is this? The face, or what had been the face, is no longer recognizable. The skin has swollen to bursting like a burnt sausage and its hue is blackened and no longer does it have the texture of skin but of something pulpy, liquefied. Like the manic glittering flies that crawl over everything, this skin exudes a dark iridescence. The body has become a bloated balloon-body, fought over by masses of flies. Here and there, in crevices that had once been the mouth, the nostrils, the ears, there are writhing white patches, maggots like churning frenzied kernels of white rice. The throat of the humanoid figure seems to have been slashed. The bloodied steak knife lies close beside the figure, where it has been dropped. The figure’s arms, covered in flies, are outstretched on the bed as if quivering, about to lift in an embrace of welcome. Everywhere, dark, coagulated blood has soaked the figure’s clothing, the bedclothes, the bed, the carpet. The rot-smell is overwhelming. The carrion-smell. Yet you can’t seem to turn away. Whatever has drawn you here has not yet released you. The entire room is a crimson wound, a place of the most exquisite mystery, seething with its own inner, secret life. Your husband has not died, has not vanished but has been transmogrified into another dimension of being, observing you through a galaxy of tiny unblinking eyes: the buzzing is his voice, multiplied by millions. Flies brush against your face. Flies brush against your lips, your eyelashes. You wave them away, you step forward, to approach the figure on the bed. My valentine! My love.