The Doll-Master by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784971007
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd.

She thought— No, but you can push me overboard. In an instant, it could happen.

No one would see. No one would hear. The sound of revelry on the lower deck was too loud. Voices, laughter. Here on the third-level deck it was pitch-dark, and smelled of oil. Henry laughed as he slipped his arm around Audrey’s waist, and tugged her to stand beside him at the railing, but she shrank away like a frightened child.

“Darling, really! I thought you liked ‘romance.’”

The word romance was spoken with disdain, bemusement.

“No! Please, Henry—I think I’ll go back down...”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re staying here with me. In another moment the moon will be out...”

It was a bizarre, awkward moment: the husband tugged at the wife, to urge her to stand beside him at the railing. The husband outweighed the wife by forty pounds or more, yet in her desperation the wife held firm. Henry laughed sharply. He was being playful, or rather—not so playful. He’d gripped her arm, and was squeezing her elbow. It was the same arm he’d gripped on the stone steps, and it was bruised and sore. The wife understood that his patience with her was wearing thin. She knew: she was a foolish, willful woman. She was a spoiled bourgeois woman, haphazardly educated, naïve. If examined closely, she could not have explained the mechanics of Darwinian evolutionary theory; probably she could do no more than stammer clichés, like a TV quiz contestant. Probably she’d forgotten much of what their Ecuadoran guide had told them that very day, in the Galapagos Islands.

“Henry, no. Please don’t frighten me...”

She was poised to scream but—would anyone hear her? The sound of the ship’s gigantic ventilators was loud here. And the frantic music from the lower deck, mingled with sounds of revelry...

The wife twisted away from the husband, breaking the grip of his fingers on her arm, as a panicked cat might break free of its captor.

Panting, frightened, yet exhilarated at having escaped the husband, the wife stumbled back inside the ship, and made her way back down the narrow steps, and into a crowd of revelers spilling out of the ship’s lounge on the second level. How relieved she was!—she intended never to step out onto the Moon Deck again, no matter how Henry cajoled her.

That night in their oppressively air-conditioned cabin, in their double bed with a protruding rib of mattress down the middle, the wife whispered in the darkness: “I’m sorry, Henry—it was so dark out there, I just couldn’t stay.”

There was a pause. The husband was not asleep, but chose not to speak. Since he’d returned to the cabin, an hour after the wife, his breath smelling of liquor, he’d had little to say, though his manner was affable, indifferent; he’d read aloud to the wife from the tour program, describing the giant tortoises they were to see the next day, and as he’d undressed he caught her worried eye in the room’s single mirror, and winked. Was this a signal

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