Story Excerpt
The Heiress. The Hireling.
by Joyce Carol Oates
(in memoriam Julio C.)
She has begun to sleep more soundly in the new place at the edge of the lake large as an inland sea. She has begun to sleep with more passion, hearing waves in the night like great tongues lapping. Her dreams thrill her even as they exhaust her. Her dreams caress her even as they batter her. Her dreams are a source of intense love-sensations for her even as they cause her to weep in the luxury of guilt for she is a (new) widow and a (new) heiress and the fact is the elderly husband had chosen her, she had not chosen him; the elderly husband had loved her, and wanted her, and it had made him very happy, the elderly husband had died of sheer happiness, and the madness of such happiness, marrying her.
In the throes of such dreams finding herself sprawled in the vast bed but negligently covered as if charges hurtled against her—slut, whore!—have made her careless, defiant. Bedsheets scrunched up beneath her haunches and naked arms and legs outspread as if she has fallen from a great height. Not a new bed, in fact a very old bed with hard horsehair mattress and carved mahogany headboard but so new to her it has no identity to her except as the vast bed in the new place. Fallen in sleep not into blunt dull death but into a languorous swoon. Fallen in sleep in all confidence that softness would enclose her like a cocoon, and break her fall. In this vast bed called king-sized. Yet, it seems larger than king-sized. At least—graveyard-sized. Sprawled in the center of the bed equidistant from either side she cannot stretch her arms from one side to the other thinking But I am missing him: the other. The elderly husband had been her husband less than three months dying just twelve days before his one-hundredth birthday.
Sinking slowly into dreams that do not spring from anything so mundane as the present circumstances of her (celibate, bereaved) life which are, even to her, banal and ordinary but from a mysterious source of which she knows little: a singular root like spokes from a wheel. That the elderly husband died so soon after they were married was less of an astonishment to her, the (new) widow, than the fact that, to the mortification of the elderly husband’s adult children, the elderly husband had fallen in love with her just five months before. Aggrieved, wrathful, and bent upon vengeance the elderly husband’s adult children glared at her out of faces contorted with rage like the faces of those sculpted beings in Rodin’s Gates of Hell.
Feverishly she sleeps through the delirious hours of the night in this place new to her at the northern shore of Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains approximately 1,300 miles from the granite mausoleum in the Palm Beach Memorial Cemetery in which the elderly husband’s ashes are interred. Well into the windswept morning she sleeps. Her brain aches pleasurably with such sleep. Her lungs are full to bursting with the joy of such sleep. For something is coming to her in this sleep. For someone is coming to her in this sleep. You will not even need to know him when you see him, it is enough that he will know you.
No household staff to interrupt her sleep. No lawn crew with roaring motors to interrupt her sleep. She is the sole proprietor of the large brown-shingled house at the end of the quarter-mile graveled driveway as she is the sole owner of two hundred eighty acres north of Lake George, New York. Giving herself up lavishly to dreams so much more potent than anything in waking life which has become for her a dully anesthetized life, muted and routine, cocooned by immediate wealth and the possibility of further wealth when the last of the lawsuits is finally settled. For in the wake of the death of the elderly husband has come a succession of lawsuits challenging his will with the avidity of filth bobbing at the edge of a stagnant lake.
In these dreams she observes in unnerving close-up (as she’d been spared in life) the bitter resentment, revulsion, repugnance in the faces of the elderly husband’s adult children who, so long as he was alive, contrived to maintain a steely-eyed affability in her company however in private they might have pleaded with him to send her away, begged him not to marry her, a woman nearly fifty years younger than he, and looking younger still. In these dreams like rolling, rocking waves in a hilarity of drunken glee she laughs openly at them as a defiant child might laugh Catch me if you can! You fools, you can’t.
Claiming that she’d seduced, cajoled, manipulated an elderly delusional ninety-nine-year-old man into marrying her, with the intention of inheriting his estate upon his (imminent) death when in fact she’d married her husband for love. For the sake of his love for her. Sleeping now in the vast canopied four-poster bed in the master bedroom of the new place recalling how he’d begged her to marry him. He, her. Secure in the knowledge that this place to which she has fled, exhausted and battered by the protracted legal battles that have persisted longer than the marriage preceding it, is her rightful inheritance, though but a portion of that inheritance; that it is her reward, though she had not demanded such a reward, nor even been aware that such a reward might be hers; she had not declined a prenuptial contract for no such contract was required of her by the adoring elderly husband; shocking to her, yet gratifying, how the elderly husband defied his adult children for her sake; even as in elderly naivety he’d abandoned her to their fury slow-gathering like thunderhead clouds in the perpetually ravaged sky above the Adirondack Mountains.
Sleeping ever more soundly, deeply. Sleeping with such passion, her heart threatens to burst. (Yes: She does rouse herself to shakily cross the hardwood floor to the adjoining bathroom when required. She does rouse herself to descend the staircase, rummage in the enormous refrigerator for something edible she has caused to be delivered from the grocery store in the Village of Lake George with the Visa card shared with the late elderly husband.) Not thinking of any future for the intense pleasure of sleep is now, not then. As in the intense pleasure of he, not her. For if the final lawsuit initiated by the vindictive adult children winding its way through probate court with the peristaltic obstinacy of goat-sized prey winding its way through the guts of a boa constrictor is decided in the widow’s favor the widow will be even wealthier than she is now; and how strange to her that in the midpoint of her life she has become an heiress of such an estate even as she is the sole survivor of her own family; even as she’d been a devastated widow years before, having lost an earlier husband who survives in her memory like tender scar tissue on a part of the body not visible to the mourner as it is not visible to others. And since she’d had no children from that long-ago marriage she finds herself the sole survivor of her lineage and thus the end of that lineage.
Shuddering in the throes of sleep. Entranced, mesmerized. In this new place in this vast bed beneath the ravaged Adirondack sky each morning more reluctant to open her eyelids still less to get up! get dressed! for why should she rouse herself to mere wakefulness, consciousness out of languorous sleep, heavy-limbed as Rodin statuary, her soft-muscled heart beating slowly and calmly in the wake of swooning dreams that leave her sweetly exhausted, satiated yet with a longing to return to sleep where there has begun to be visible, framed as in a tunnel emblazoned with light, a dramatic silhouetted figure lacking a precise face: tawny panther-eyes glimmering in darkness fastened upon her as the widow, the heiress, the target. . . .
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Copyright © 2024 The Heiress. The Hireling. by Joyce Carol Oates