I Am No One You Know by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Joyce Carol Oates]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061745751
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

The Boathouse. The Roostertail. Davy Deezz Gent’s Club. Café a Go-Go. The Starboard. Good Times. First & Ten Sports Club. Mitch’s Tavern & Bowling Lanes. Cruising Perrysburg’s riverfront district as dusk came swiftly on. There was a shabbily romantic cocktail lounge called Blue Guitar in one of the downtown hotels, she seemed to remember. She’d been taken there years ago by a man whose name she couldn’t now recall or didn’t wish to recall though she recalled vividly that he’d been a married man, and she’d liked that: the thrill of trespassing, of taking something belonging to another. If only temporarily.

She never found Blue Guitar. But there was Firs Inn & Marina on the river. Near downtown police headquarters, it was said to be a popular hangout for off-duty cops. Neon flashed in every window. Behind the inn was the marina. A flotilla of sailboats. Flags on their tall masts whipped in the wind. Speedboats, yachts, rocked with the waves. In the vestibule of the inn, warm, smelly air rushed at her as if out of the past. Her heart quickened. How relieved she was to be here. To have avoided the relatives. The funeral luncheon given by a younger sister of her father’s. There the relatives murmured, scolding, Now where’s Vivian? And Harvey would repeat, She’s in shock. I told you, let her alone.

Harvey loved her. Harvey, her big brother. Harvey would protect Vivie even from himself.

Vivian stepped into the dimly lighted bar and quickly calculated where to sit: at the bar, or in one of the booths. A booth was always a prudent idea. But at the bar she could catch fugitive glimpses of her face in the mirror behind rows of glittering bottles. In her thirties, somehow she’d become a woman who looked her best in tawdry lights. Flashing neon like a fevered pulse. She was relaxed, she was prone to laughter. Even when she’d been a serious graduate student in English literature, even when she’d been a promising assistant professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton she’d rewarded herself for bad times by visiting such places.

Vivian sat at the bar. Except for an amorous couple, the girl in a leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings, bouffant hair, the other eight or nine patrons at the bar were men. She ordered a scotch on the rocks. The bartender was trying not to be curious about her, she hoped to Christ she hadn’t gone to Perrysburg High with him.

Drinking clarified. Confusion dissolved. She smiled to think that from a certain perspective all of that day of her father’s funeral including the vision of light flashing out from the closed casket had been leading to this moment of grace: Vivian’s first serious drink in months.

She wanted to be alone, she would have said. When a husky bearded man with a familiar face, seated a few stools away, leaned over to say hello, asked if she was Vivie West, Vivian shook her head without engaging him. But a

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