High Crime Area by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781784081607
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2014-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

The Last Man of Letters

It was a season of numerous discontents. The more acclaimed X was, the more the myriad imperfections of others offended him. The imperfections of women, particularly.

There were women who offended by making no effort to be feminine—sexually attractive. There were women who offended by making too obvious an effort. As if he, aged seventy-three, were an ordinary old fool, a would-be lecher to be galvanized into responding to female subterfuge of any kind.

X had become by degrees an elder literary celebrity of international reputation, a novelist, poet and essayist once called by the Times Literary Supplement the “last man of letters”—an exaggeration surely, but one which pleased. He was a perennial candidate for a Nobel Prize, a favorite of many outspoken literary commentators in England and the United States. In real life he was larger, more bulky of body than his photographs suggested; still he had a handsome head, a much-creased but lapidary face with recessed, hooded, haunted-looking eyes, thin white hair brushed back from his forehead in wings. He smiled rarely; his face had grown mask-like with thought, calculation. His manners were exquisite, though sometimes rather rude. He was, his admirers acknowledged, difficult. But a genius of course. Even before he’d become rich he’d taken care to dress expensively in custom-made suits, perfectly starched white cotton shirts, elegant neckties. His nails were manicured, his jaws always smoothly shaven, his cologne carefully chosen. There had emerged in the past several months a just-perceptible, infuriating tremor in his left hand which X controlled by gripping that hand tightly whenever possible. And sometimes, in the early morning, his eyes watered mysteriously, blurring his vision in a maddening way as if his eyes were unprepared, after the intense, private state of sleep, for contact with the air. But X had never been one to indulge weakness in himself or in others, and he gave little thought to these matters. Because he’d become famous, he was much photographed; because much photographed he became yet more famous. Often he murmured his name aloud—X. I am he, I am X and no other. He could not have said if he was proud of such a fate, or humble. From within, the great man may be as much in awe of his greatness as are others. How has it happened—I am X. These were secrets of X’s inner life of course. Never shared with another.

Another secret, X could not keep from sharing with certain others: his several wives, and those women with whom, over the decades, he’d become intimate. This was his asthmatic condition, which he’d endured through more than six decades. The attacks varied widely in intensity, having been very severe in childhood, intermittently so in adulthood and now more or less controlled by medication developed in the last twenty years. Yet sometimes in the middle of the night X woke choking for breath, thrashing about in terror that breath would be denied him—his life would be denied him! He’d badly frightened

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