Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

this memoir my life's work, but Father has had innumerable jobs. Perhaps he's had so many, did so much, because he could sense that his only child would accomplish nothing. But Father didn't really sense anything. He didn't bother figuring out emotions or intangibles. His IQ^, you'll be interested to know, was only 120. What accounts for his success, then? (At this writing he is president of Crescent Steel.) Good stomach juices, I think, and an acute apparatus for balance in his inner ear. One of Nada's annoying friends, a psychiatrist named Melin, declared in my hearing (I was behind a sofa) that Father's business successes were due to a gland no more than an inch long at the base of his spinal cord, but he might have been joking. That bastard Melin was a big joker.
    What else would you like to know about Father? I want to draw him in here so that when you see him, in the following pages, you'll know who he is even if he behaves strangely. Most novels, which are fictionand therefore limited, have to build up characters slowly and don't dare allow them to be eccentric or surprising unless this is planned; but my memoir deals with real people, who are already alive and quite ordinarily living but who may then do things that seem out of “character”: a gentleman who is also a son-of-a-bitch, a dope who is also shrewd, etc. Father's waist sagged despite his golf and steam baths, and he was too vain to wear glasses, so he had to hold his newspaper slightly off to one side when he read (though he didn't read much), and he was fond of wrestling matches on television, and he liked steaks with mushroom sauce, steaks with garlic, steaks on boards, and steaks pierced through their bloody hearts on silver sticks, only one kind of potato (mashed) and lots of cheap doughy bread, and sweet, ghastly sweet, little pickles—baby midget gherkins he'd eat by the handful, chomping and chopping his way with his big teeth. And Scotch. Too much Scotch. His clothes were expensive because he had no idea there were cheaper clothes available, but on him they looked as if he'd worn them on an overnight plane ride from Calcutta or Tokyo. With his cheerful, sad brown eyes, always a little puffed, he looked like a bloated elf, like a man who has been awake all night, lying in his rumpled street clothes. I have a photograph taken of him in Tokyo, incidentally. He is standing with his arms folded in imitation of a great statue of Buddha that is in the distance behind him; both he and the Buddha look drunk, though the Buddha does not look as rumpled as Father. The back of the photograph is scrawled over with Japanese, and the “secret” of the message has long been lost to Father. (I have a drawer full of photographs and other sentimental trash I've brought along from my life as a child, my living life. I'll go through them in a later chapter and remark upon them, especially Nada's. But how strange these people have already begun to look, especially myself!)
    The oddest thing of all was that while I loved Father I did not really believe he was my father. All my life I had visions of another man, my true father, and while he might appear in the body of the father I had been stuck with, his voice, his personality, and his soul were entirely different. For instance, my father was always happy. What can you do with a father who is always—nearly always—happy? He was happy putting up with Nada's boorish intellectual friends, he was happy with me when I failed him as a son (when I tried out for sixth-grade baseball at Wells Lorraine Boys' School my glasses were broken in the firstfifteen minutes), he was happy when around him everyone was miserable, in bad weather, in stock-market declines, national emergencies. Listen to him come into a room, carrying his drink, and declare in a loud nostalgic voice:
    “What good does it do, eh? What good does it ever do? You give your best and you drop dead like Arnold did. My God, what a shame. What a shame. He was