Give Me Your Heart by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

her hair where she’d leaned toward him,
trembling.
    “Valerie, of course. I feel the same way.”
    He did! In that instant, Leonard did.
    They’d been introduced by mutual friends. Leonard was a highly paid litigator attached to the legal department of the most distinguished architectural firm in New York City, its
headquarters in lower Manhattan on Rector Street. Leonard’s specialty was tax law, and within that specialty he prepared and argued cases in federal appeals courts. He was one of a team.
There were enormous penalties for missteps, sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And there were enormous rewards when things went well.
    “A litigator goes for the jugular.”
    Valerie wasn’t one to flatter, you could see. Her admiration was sincere.
    Leonard had laughed, blushing with pleasure. In his heart thinking he was one in a frantic swarm of piranha fish and not the swiftest, most deadly, or even, at thirty-four, as he’d been at
the time, among the youngest.
    The poised, beautiful young woman was Valerie Fairfax. Her maiden name: crisp, clear, Anglo, unambiguous. (Not a hint of Yardman.) At Citibank headquarters in Manhattan, Valerie had the title of
vice president of human resources. How serious she was about her work! She wore Armani suits in subdued tones: oatmeal, powder gray, charcoal. She wore pencil-thin skirts and she wore trousers with
sharp creases. She wore trim little jackets with slightly padded shoulders. Her hair was stylishly razor-cut to frame her face, to suggest delicacy where there was in fact solidity. Her fragrance
was discreet, faintly astringent. Her handshake was firm and yet, in certain circumstances, yielding. She displayed little interest in speaking of the past, though she spoke animatedly on a variety
of subjects. She thought well of herself and wished to think well of Leonard and so had a way of making Leonard more interesting to himself, more mysterious.
    The first full night they spent together, in the apartment on East 79th Street where Leonard was living at the time, a flush of excitement had come into Valerie’s face as, after several
glasses of wine, she confessed how at Citibank she was the vice president of her department elected to fire people because she was so good at it.
    “I never let sentiment interfere with my sense of justice. It’s in my genes, I think.”
    • • •
    Now you didn’t say fired. You said downsized.
    You might say dismissed, terminated. You might say, of vanished colleagues, gone.
    Leonard typed into his laptop a private message to himself:
    Not me. Not this season. They can’t!
    Another time, in fact many times, he’d typed Yardman into his computer. (At the office, not at home. He and Valerie shared a computer at home. Leonard knew that in
cyberspace, nothing is ever erased, though it might be subsequently regretted, and so at home he never typed into the computer anything he might not wish his wife to discover in some ghost-remnant
way.) Hundreds of citations for Yardman, but none for Oliver Yardman so far. He meant to keep looking.
    “. . . first husband.”
    Like an abscessed tooth secretly rotting in his jaw.
    In his office on the twenty-ninth floor at Rector Street. On the 7:10 A.M. Amtrak into Grand Central Station and on the 6:55 P.M. Amtrak out of Grand Central returning to Salthill Landing. In
the interstices of his relations with others: colleagues, clients, fellow commuters, social acquaintances, friends. In the cracks of a densely scheduled life, the obsession with Oliver Yardman grew
the way the hardiest weeds will flourish in soil scarcely hospitable to plant life.
    Sure he knows. Knows of me: second husband. What he must remember! Of her.
    Had to wonder how often Valerie glanced through the Polaroids in the desk drawer. How frequently, even when they’d been newly lovers, she’d shut her eyes to summon back the first
husband, the sulky spoiled mouth, the brazen hands, the hard stiff penis thrumming