Expensive People (20 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
We sped along the expressway and out toward the suburbs, passing beneath sleazy viaducts and overpasses where Negro children dawdled, some of them kicking pebbles off onto the passing cars, and while the perspiration gleamed on Mr. Hofstadter's handsome forehead and his shoulders in their expensive tweed began to hunch up with cunning, we children tried to keep up our miserable conversation. I think it was Maureen who said, “Music is the only thing that can make you happy without qualification,” or else I said it; and Gustave replied, his sentence peaking in the middle with the sudden swerve of his Father's excellent automobile, “Music bypasses the mind altogether …” We drifted on to talk of chess, but our desperate conversation inside the hurtling vehicle of steel and glass could not compete with the lusty dramas taking place on all sides of us. Poor children!
“There, so much for him,” Mr. Hofstadter would mutter; or, “Like this—this is the way it's done!” He was not talking to us, of course. He
was talking to the other drivers. A man in a car as fine as Mr. Hof-stadter's gave him some trouble. They sped along side by side for a while, not glancing at each other, and when Mr. Hofstadter began to drift toward that car the car did not budge, no, not an inch, nor did anyone sound his horn, and Mr. Hofstadter laughed huskily and straightened out again, pressing his accelerator down to the floor. “We'll see, we'll see,” he whispered. He finally did get ahead of the other car, but only after an interlude of sharp squealing brakes. “I was engaged in this three-dimensional chess game,” Gustave said nervously. “My opponent is a member of London Teen-Mensa …”
After a few confused moments we flashed under an overpass, and just at that moment some kids dropped something over—a length of pipe, maybe—and it hit the windshield of a car alongside us. The car immediately swerved and fell back. Mr. Hofstadter accelerated. Maureen and I looked out and saw the car bounce up on the shoulder of the expressway, veer along at a tremendous speed, and crumple against a series of posts.
“Oh, look! Look at that!” I cried.
“Filming,” said Mr. Hofstadter.
The accident was already some distance behind us.
“What?”
“It's a rehearsal. Television show,” Mr. Hofstadter said and kept on going.
Gustave had told me once that his father had been born on a yacht on the Detroit River, one sunny Sunday many years ago. The birth had been the result of a grand slam dealt to his mother by a kindly hostess, and so Mr. Hofstadter had come into the world a few weeks early, lusty and bawling and ready to go. He hasn't stopped yet. He's still going strong, I know, since a recent
Time
showed him in a photograph with several fierce sheiks, aging but still handsome. And Gustave, if you're interested, is already a senior at Harvard, excelling in mathematics, and Maureen is studying in Bristol, and they're all growing up, going along their ways, “getting along,” but I, I sit here at the end of my life. Now I have my meals sent up from a roachy delicatessen because it's easier that way and I can avoid the unfriendly stares of people in this neighborhood. It's strange how people end up, how different their destinies are, though at one time in their lives they've been together in a hurtling automobile just a few feet or a few seconds from death.
REVIEWS OF
EXPENSIVE PEOPLE
Everyone imagines with horror the opinions of others, but few people are unfortunate enough really to know what these opinions are. We are all paranoid, all self-loathing and vaguely doomed, but only writers and other exhibitionists are told the terrible truth about themselves. Ordinary people never know anything. They suspect but do not know. Years pass. Nobody gives a damn, nobody is watching. They die. They are forgotten. I, Richard Everett, will die and be forgotten and never know the truth about myself, if there is “truth,” and so …
And so I have made up some truths. Last night I made them up. I should keep them for an Appendix to this book, but I am greedy and impatient and masochistic, and so here they are. The posthumous future doesn't seem quite real to me, but I suppose it will come. Can it be possible that you are reading this book in 1969, or later? This moment seems so real to me, so gluey and sluggish, that only a great effort of will can get me past it. I won't be alive to see the actual reviews of my exhaustive work, and no doubt that's just as well. But I imagine they will take these forms:
The New York Times Book Review:
It is sheer cant (though speculative) that the product of a mad, feverish mind must be in itself mad and feverish, as if the mind, like Kant's kneecap, could bend only one way. This dogma seems possible only when the “voice” of the madman is so hysterical that it engulfs—one might say
drowns out
—the legitimate feverish voice of the writer. Verbal felicity or verbal awkwardness aside, the essential rhetorical pose of
Expensive Peopkis
perhaps more mad than simply feverish, more sentimentally eclectic (in the
kitsch
sense) than tragically enlightened …
Time Magazine:
Confused and confusing tale of a child with a famous madcap socialite mother and a dear doddering foolish father, set in that well-covered terrain, Suburbia. Everett sets out to prove that he can outsmartre Sartre but doesn't quite make it. It is all great fun though. As there should be, there are Problems with Mother. But these are probably resolved as the
novel progresses. Hijinks galore, but, like a damp firecracker, most of them smolder rather than explode. There is a hint of patronage in all this (we are asked to believe the author is only eleven!), as there is in the best of documentaries about Eskimo or New Zealand customs. Of course it has all been done before, and with superior skill, by John O'Hara and Louis Auchincloss, and if and when Everett learns the lyric cry of rapture and horror which these authors call forth he will perhaps be worthy of our attention.
The New Republic:
Expensive People
has as its verbal mode the reduction of a generation's anguish to the insufferable lyricism of one child; as the talisman of at least one plane of its purported operations, it exhibits vast mountains of junk (middle-class acquisitions, symbolic of life), about which its child-narrator turns dizzily, dreaming not simply the manic dream of the middle class (which never wakes in this novel), but also the manic dream of the would-be novelist who would reduce complex sociological material to a thalamic crisis. For the mythic-sexual-sociological dimension is what Everett desires, though he fails utterly in his inability to get very far beyond common psychosexual boundaries into realms of metaphysical and cultural-philosophical recognition. The whole point of the doomed child is his legendary quality: exemplary of the American confusion between orders of being, of our perpetual conversion of sexuality into one kind of art and the consequent depletion of the sexual by being turned into emblem and shady metaphor. This entire problem was taken up only two months ago by the “Faintest Idea” troupe, who are running an amateur living theater in San Francisco, and their insistence upon definite ritualistic analogues and socio-emblematic drama have, in my opinion at least, cleared up this issue once and for all. Their shattering play,
Genghis Proust,
which takes place on a pitch-black stage, has been reviewed at length earlier in
The New Republic,
and I need say no more about it except to underscore my feeling that only at such points of moral infinity can this new energy find its proper mode in the creation of revolutionary substance.
Expensive People,
traditional as Charles Dickens, is therefore an irrelevant exercise …
Hanley Stuart Hingham, a famous critic, writing in any one of the literary quarterlies:
And now we turn from Nabokov's scintillating anal fantasies to the crude oral fantasies of one Richard Everett, in a first novel called
Expen-
sive People.
Worthless as sociological material (Everett shows a most na'ive admiration for the Businessman, suggesting he's never met one), ludicrous as drama (any alert reader, thumbing through the book, will be able to predict the sorry outcome), embarrassing as prose (I'm the only reviewer content with the assertion that the author is an eighteen-year-old madman, I'm sure),
Expensive People
is nevertheless valuable as a fabulous excursion into the realm of the orally obsessed. Food abounds in this memoir. Sex is metamorphosed into the more immediate, more salivating form of food, so that it can be taken legally and morally through the mouth. But, as if to deny this surreptitious gratification, the novel is also filled with vomit. Those of us who have read Freud (I have read every book, essay, and scrap of paper written by Freud) will recognize easily the familiar domestic triangle here, of a son's homosexual and incestuous love for his father disguised by a humdrum Oedipal attachment to his mother. Author Everett, obviously an amateur, failed to make the best use of his oral theme by his crudity of material. He should have had the crazy young hero gobble down hot-dogs, ice-cream cones, ladyfingers, all-day suckers. Instead, Everett doesn't bother specifying the food imagery. It is this lack of skill that sets him apart from Nabokov, whose every sentence is calculated, whose every image calls up at once from the deepest reservoirs of our souls Freudian responses of the sort that make Great Literature.
Gustave told me later that the evening of the chamber-music concert had been an unusual evening for his father. “He was tired when he flew in from Spain, and he probably should have rested,” Gustave said meekly.
I want to describe Gustave again, since he looked so much like me. You probably don't know what I looked like. He was a small, slender child with a patient and ageless face, serious eyes, a thin, serious mouth, and glasses with pink transparent frames; his narrow shoulders had the look of carrying enormous invisible burdens. Children like this are given to sudden eruptions of shrill, nervous laughter, after which they lapse into the silence that seems characteristic of them. We metamorphose into middle age without much strain, and the silence of
our childhoods turns into a certain fussiness in old age about food, drafts from windows that only seem to be closed, and changing times.
Gustave told me that his father had done a peculiar thing that night: when he drove up the Hofstadter driveway he deliberately ran into the garage door, which was closed. The door was usually operated by electricity, like all Fernwood garage doors, but something had happened to the mechanism in the automobile, and when Mr. Hofstadter turned up his driveway and pressed his button, nothing happened. In Fernwood (I should have mentioned this earlier) all garage doors slide meekly up when their owners' automobiles turn in the driveway. They just do. Children don't question this; it is a fact of ordinary life. But the seeing-eye mechanism broke down that night and Mr. Hofstadter's finger was impotent on the button, but keep going he did, his gaze steady and cold on the garage door, and he ran right into it going ten miles an hour and crumpled the garage door and the front of his car. But he seemed satisfied, Gustave reported, for the first time that day. He went right inside the house and upstairs and to bed, where he slept soundly.
Something strange happened in my own life, with my own father. When Father arrived home the next day he asked me about the concert. We sat, two rambling, happy bachelors, in the Family Room, which we had never used, gazing through a big plate-glass patio door onto a patio, which we had never used and were never to use, and Father asked me closely about Mozart. I noticed that Father wore a new suit, not yet rumpled. He was not a handsome man but there was something attractive about his face, or perhaps his expression. You could tell by looking at him that he
wanted to
be good, and wasn't wanting almost enough? (In my desperate reading in preparation for this memoir I came across the heresies of one Flavius Maurus, who believed that the only Good was in desire and not in act, since purity can exist only in the mind. In his religion, wouldn't Father be saved?) I feel the itch to describe my father on all these pages, to get him down good once and for all, but do you know it's almost impossible? I always kept imagining that he wasn't really my father and another man would take his place. I was crazy. This big, lumpy, strong man with his tobacco-stained fingers and his habit of twirling wine about in wine glasses with a loving, precise skill was my father, all mine, and in a way he may be your father too. Let's all share him! And if you are a father yourself,
you'll see yourself in Father. One cannot imagine him as a child or a young man, since he has been full-grown for so long, with his past as compact behind him as his wallet, which is filled not with money but credit cards, slim and flat, stuffed in his back pocket, his past so very slim and flat itself that for all practical purposes it did not exist. And his future? Imaginable only as an extension and inflation of his present.
He said, “I always did admire Mozart but you know I haven't had the time to develop that side of myself. I'm going to set aside two hours of each day, from now on, to catch up on things. Dickie, have you done much reading in Sartre?”
“I guess not.”
“Yes, well. Sartre is well worth reading.”
“We read something in French class once, just an essay. It was sort of hard.”
Father brightened at hearing this. “Yes, well, Kid, everything worthwhile is difficult, as Plato said. Or did Plato say everything difficult is worthwhile? It's the same thing. But I think Sartre has something to say and I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to give him the time to say it to me.”
He smiled and seemed to be awaiting my approval.
I filled in great gaps of time by sleeping and eating, lying around the house. Sometimes I would be awakened by Father's striding into the room, all set for our daily afternoon walk, or ready to drive us to a Little League baseball game some friends' kids were in. He had a full life, Nada or no Nada. Father had instructed Florence to take the mail in before I got hold of it, so I didn't know if Nada was writing to him or not. She had stopped writing to me. There was something mysterious going on. I felt strange and inert, like a sleepwalker, and even when I did want to wake up I couldn't. I couldn't make myself rise out of sleep. Sometimes it frightened me, because I thought I might die, and the only thing to do was to think about something, some single, crucial
thing
that could draw me out of this paralysis. So I contemplated my toothbrush, which was far away upstairs, and imagined its appearance until my heart pounded with renewed vigor and I had to run up to my bathroom to check that trivial object. So far, so good. Or I doubted the reality of Florence, our good maid, and had to run to see her. Or I tried to reconstruct the room I had spent eighteen months of my life in back in Charlotte Pointe, imagining each wall, window, the furniture, the
ugly tile, the apple tree outside. It took such enormous mental efforts to raise me out of my lethargy.
