He staggered down the redwood steps, made his way to his car parked in the cul-de-sac. His heart was beating so hard it felt like 190 * joyce carol oates

  bursting and his eyes leaked tears of hurt and indignation and when he wiped his damp face on his jacket sleeve, he saw that he was bleeding but what a good feeling this was!—climbing into his car, driving away.

  Thinking elated I could have killed him. But I didn’t.

  Thinking He won’t reveal this. Not ever.

  He laughed, he’d shamed the old man. Broken and humiliated the old man and the knowledge would prevail between them, forever.

  On the way home he stopped at a darkened gas station. Discarded what remained of what he’d purchased that evening. He was coming down from the high, but he didn’t yet feel like shit. He felt pretty good. A balloon into which hot crazed helium gas has been pumped, pumped to near-bursting and now the helium was leaking out but not quite yet, the balloon was still aloft, adrift. He wouldn’t risk waking his mother, entering the house. In the driveway he parked his car where approximately he’d parked it earlier, you could see the tire tracks, not quite obscured by fresh snow.

  Behind the wheel he slept, his head flung back against the headrest and his mouth open and agape and leaking drool and watery blood and hours later—somehow it had become daylight, a wary thin-looking very cold but windless daylight—and he was being wakened by a sharp rapping against the window beside his head and it was his mother stricken with alarm, and now he must explain in a reasonably coherent and convincing voice where he’d been, what he’d done, unable to sleep after the heavy Thanksgiving meal and so hiking in the nature preserve and he’d fallen on some rocks, cut his face, his lip, scraped his knuckles, he was God-damned sorry to be upsetting her; and he saw in her dazed eyes how she doubted him, for how could she but doubt him, who lied so extravagantly, so recklessly; he saw in her dazed just-slightly-bloodshot beautiful dark-lashed eyes how she made the decision, quick as a heartbeat, and irrevocable, to believe him; laughing with sudden relief, clutching at him saying thank God!—he hadn’t injured himself seriously, behaving in such a way. And staggering beneath the weight of his Vigilante * 191

  arm slung around her shoulders she helped him make his way into the house, and to the downstairs bathroom where tenderly with trembling hands she washed his battered face in warm water, she examined his numerous cuts and bruises and his skinned and swollen knuckles, impulsively she kissed the knuckles of his right hand exacting from him the promise he would never behave so recklessly again.

  He was overcome with love. He said, hey Mom: sure.

  The Heart Sutra

  I t has not happened yet. This most exquisite moment of equipoise, equilibrium.

  The moment between heartbeats. The moment between breaths. The moment of quick sharp terror before the plunge into orgasm, the body’s helpless convulsing as the soul is extinguished like a fl ame.

  Sometime before dawn of March 31. Though Serena has no sense of the date as she has but the vaguest sense of the season: this teasing New En gland stasis between late winter and early spring. She is certain she hasn’t been sleeping—not since Andre has left her and the child—yet her eyes spring open alert and dilated. Someone—it must be Andre—has unlocked a rear door, has entered the house quietly and is approaching in the hall. Serena’s heart pounds like a terrifi ed bird beating wings in her chest, she clutches the fi fteen-month little Andre in her arms hearing his father’s footsteps in the corridor—

  “Andre? We’re in here.”

  He will know where to fi nd us. I have left messages—so many messages! His assistant knows. His friends know. He knows that I am waiting, and that I am not going to go away.

  The Heart Sutra * 193

  This raging insomnia! The sixth night of Serena Dayinka’s vigil in the borrowed house—the Nichelsons’ “big-open house” the child calls it, so many skylights, floor-to- ceiling plate glass windows, sliding glass doors overlooking a hilly late-winter terrain of drained and etiolated and curiously depthless pine woods—on rural-suburban Edgehill Lane three miles north of the village of Tarkington, Massachusetts. Serena has had phases of insomnia in the past—since the age of thirteen, when her father went away—but none has been so virulent as this, raging like wild fire, dry brush, furious crackling flames rushing over the glassy walls, the high white ceilings and the hardwood floors whose high gloss has been dulled by boot prints (she, the grateful occupant of the borrowed house, de facto homeless until her June first residency begins at Breadloaf ) has been careless about tracking damp, mud, gravel in and out, indifferent to stains from the child’s spilled food and leaky sodden underpants where in one of his more robust moods he has played at pushing himself across the floor like a little monkey) as other parts of the beautifully furnished house will be discovered to have been defi led by the recent occupants, some more willfully than others. How could this horror have happened! We welcomed her into our house to help her out, she was in such a predicament. We did it to help out Andre. We had no idea the poor woman was so—Wiping the child’s runny nose on a paper cocktail napkin she then crumples and tosses aside—much of the house is strewn with wadded stiffened tissues—mother and little Andre are lying in a patch of sunshine on the high-gloss living room floor, the several bedrooms in the Nichelsons’ house have become too smelly.

  Serena laughs to think how such superior individuals as Gerald and Danielle Nichelson—he, Andre Gatteau’s poet-critic pal who publishes so frequently in The New York Review of Books, she, a “celebrated” Renaissance art historian—will be obliged to stammer the inevitable clichés, how scripted their reactions will be, like those of TV performers. All of Andre Gatteau’s friends, acquaintances, 194 * joyce carol oates

  admirers—everyone who has known both Andre and Serena—and those who knew Andre’s son—will be forced to stammer in the days, weeks, months to follow But where was Andre, how could Andre have allowed such a horror to happen!

  She laughs, to think.

  Well, where is Andre Gatteau? In the early-morning of March 31?

  Andre is in retreat. Andre has gone away for an indeterminate period of time—it might be a few days, a week, two weeks. Very likely, it will not be longer, nor has he traveled abroad, for, as his assistant knows, he has not taken his passport; she has reason to suspect, since she’d made hurried arrangements for him just the previous week, that Andre Gatteau is at the Lost Lake Mountain Zen Retreat in the Adirondack Mountains, eleven miles west of Schroon Lake.

  Several times in the past twenty-three years, Andre Gatteau has retreated to Lost Lake Mountain. In the exigency of personal crises, Lost Lake Mountain has become his solace, his spiritual home. That place where, when you come there, they have to take you in.

  Here, in the mist-shrouded Adirondack dawn, so cold in the barely heated sesshin room overlooking leaden-glass Lost Lake that his breath is steaming, Andre Gatteau, fifty-three years old and feeling his age, is sitting zazen with a dozen other seekers of en-lightenment under the tutelage of a revered Zen monk. They were wakened in the dark at 5:45 a.m., it is not yet 7:30 a.m., and already Andre Gatteau is feeling the strain of the intense Zen meditation.

  Though Andre has been sitting zazen—in the classic lotus position, buttocks on the bare pine floorboards, ankles tucked beneath (sinewy-muscled) legs, knees raised and hands in loosely gripped fists on his knees—for little more than an hour, already his bladder is pinching with a need to urinate; there have come mocking little jabs of arthritic pain not only in his legs but in his wrists, and in that tenderly vulnerable spot at the base of his spine; he is assailed by distracting thoughts, hornet-thoughts, obsessive thoughts—all The Heart Sutra * 195

  that Zen meditation forbids. Observe your thoughts. Observe your thoughts as they emerge, as they arise, as they fill your consciousness, as they clamor and howl and fade and vanish, observe your thoughts knowing always that your thoughts are not you: your thoughts are not your Zen-mind.

  This is true! He knows, this is the one true fact.

  And so he is determined, this time at Lost Lake Mountain he will not fail. As he did not fail in the several heroic endeavors of his life, the first of these being a re-invention of his life, a scouring and a cleansing and a re-making of his soul, as an African-American boy of fourteen, in Lakeland, Florida.

  The eastern sky above Mt. Hood is veined and mottled like a tumorous growth, curious streaks of shadow, crevices of sunshine and rain-swollen cumulous clouds. Here is the beauty of the world, without humankind to name it.

  With the exception of a flush-faced porcine white man in his sixties and an older, emaciated white woman with a starved-hawk look of sheer desperation— Help me! help me! —the other Zen-seekers embarked upon this twelve-day sesshin retreat appear to be considerably younger than Andre Gatteau. At the silent breakfast Andre had taken care not to look at anyone very closely—Andre Gatteau isn’t a man who wishes to exchange smiles, greetings, handshakes with strangers—certainly Andre doesn’t want anyone to look closely at him. Known for his shyness, or his willful passivity, Andre is one to speak only when directly addressed and then often in a near-audible murmur. (Though he reads his poetry on stage, as a performer, in a voice of astonishing emotional nuance, power, and beauty.) Andre is a stocky dark-skinned man with a wrestler’s build: muscled shoulders, large hands and feet, slightly foreshort-ened legs. His face looks as if it has been battered, as in a car wreck; he is ugly-handsome, with unusually large alert almond-shaped eyes aslant in his stolid face; on his forehead just beneath his hairline is a sickle-shaped scar, that catches the light like a winking third eye. His graying nubby hair is trimmed short. Not a tall man, at five-foot-nine, Andre carries himself with an almost military bearing, he has a dread of stooped shoulders, a drooping head; he 196 * joyce carol oates

  has a dread of aging, as he cannot imagine a future in which, by an effort of will, he will not be able to control the circumstances of his life utterly.

  At Lost Lake, Andre Gatteau is incognito. In any case no incoming calls are accepted here, and no uninvited visitors. The effort of sesshin is intense meditation: sitting zazen seven to ten hours daily, in the late afternoon walking zazen on the trails circling the retreat.

  There are interludes of work zazen, Zen instruction, brief breaks for meals, bedtime promptly after sunset.

  Andre relieves some of the stress of the zazen meditation by going for a run of two to three miles before the eve ning meal and already by mid-morning his body yearns ahead to that interlude of release, and freedom: always Andre has gone on solitary runs, often in the early morning, or in the early eve ning after a day of highly concentrated work. Take me with you, I’m a runner too, I promise I won’t talk to you Andre please take me with you she’d pleaded before pregnancy distended her small supple body and there was no possibility of Serena joining him.

  It was nothing personal: Andre had never wanted anyone to accompany him, running. Since he’d begun seriously writing poetry in his mid-twenties running—solitary running—has been sacred to him, a time of intense meditation: his model is the blind John Milton who’d purposefully spent much of his time alone, developing his remarkable memory as one might develop muscles through sheer exercise and repetition; Milton could retain as many as fifty hendecasyllables of blank verse in his memory at a single time and then dictate these to whoever was available. In this way the entirety of the magnifi cent Paradise Lost was composed.

  No living poet can be said to be “famous” in America—nor even

  “known”—yet in some quarters, predominantly east-coast, urban, and academic, Andre Gatteau has become a famous name in the past fifteen years: his photograph has appeared in the New York Times (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur award, et al.), he has been the subject of lengthy profiles in the New Yorker and Harper’s. Such attention has made Andre even more self-conscious The Heart Sutra * 197

  in public. Serena teased Poor Andre! He resents being recognized when he doesn’t want to be recognized and he resents not being recognized when he isn’t recognized.

  Serena! His heart contracts in pain, he will not think of her.

  Nor of the child: his child.

  Hers, and his. He cannot think Ours.

  Andre? Please call me.

  I am so sorry, I did not mean to be so emotional.

  Did not mean to accuse you, it’s just I am so exhausted.

  Andre, forgive me, you know I didn’t mean the ridiculous things I said.

  Little Andre is missing you, darling. Here, I will put him on the line, say hello to Daddy, honey, c’mon sweetie Daddy is listening—

  Call my cell phone, Andre. It’s never turned off. I am staying at Gerald ’s and Danielle’s as you know, I am expecting to see you here maybe this weekend, please call and confirm will you, I will leave their number another time in case you’ve misplaced it.

  As the Heart Sutra is being chanted by Zen devotees, young Caucasians in coarse-woven monk-robes like a PBS documentary: this continuous lulling chant like slabs of water cascading down a rocky mountain stream.

  The Heart Sutra of which it is claimed that somewhere in the world at all times without ceasing the Heart Sutra which is the oldest and most beautiful of all the sutras is being chanted.

  No color sound smell taste

  Touch object of mind

  No realm of eyes no realm of mind

  No ignorance no extinction of ignorance

  No old age death no extinction of old age and death 198 * joyce carol oates

  The great bright mantra the utmost mantra

  Gone gone beyond

  Gone all the way beyond

  Bodhi Svaha!

  Serena surprised him stealing up behind him barefoot and naked except for wispy black panties sliding her small hot hands inside his shirt, kneaded and stroked his fleshy chest, tickled the taut little nipples, kiss-sucked that special spot just below his ear that never failed to arouse him sexually whispering All that Zen can tell you, darling, is what you already know: you are perfect. And—I am perfect!

  So—come to bed!

  Mum-my! Mum-my.

  The child stirs and frets in her arms, his skin is fl ushed with fever. Premature by nearly five weeks the child is prone to respiratory ailments, for several days he’s been sneezing, nose running and that tight barking little cough that tears at her heart like a reproach. Mum-my! Mum-my! Why doesn’t Dad-dy love us anymore! As the Tarkington pediatrician has recommended Serena has been giving little Andre children’s aspirin dissolved in fruit juice, she’s been urging him to eat the hot oatmeal with raisins that has been his favorite, but the child hasn’t much appetite, spits and chokes up what he manages to swallow, pushing the spoon irritably away whining Mum-my no! Don’t want.

  Even whining like a sick puppy, hair stuck to his forehead like seaweed and a powerful stench of baby-filth eking from him, little Andre is a beautiful child. No Caucasian child so beautiful as Andre Dayinka Gatteau. Exquisite thick-lashed dark-brown eyes, silky

  cocoa—

  colored skin distinctly lighter than his father’s burnished-dark skin but darker than his mother’s creamy-tawny skin, and those perfect little sculpted lips Mummy likes to kiss, suck-suck-kiss, as playfully Mummy suck-suck-kisses little Andre’s wriggling monkey-toes. It has been a while since Serena has bathed The Heart Sutra * 199

  little Andre, she intends to bathe him this morning while there is still time, no later than 11:30 a.m. she must bathe him, he must be prepared.

  In the bath, the tiny penis. Flesh-knob penis, miniature penis, so unlike the penis of an adult man she stoops to kiss it lightly, not a suck-suck-kiss in the tub (for that would be wicked, perverse)—

  such a Mummy-kiss is forbidden. God help us. God O God help us. Help me not to do this God help me send me this child ’s father O God.

  It is a fact, a legal fact: the child’s name is Andre Dayinka Gatteau.

  On the birth certificate this is so. There is no questioning the paternity of the child, Serena Dayinka and Andre Gatteau had been sharing a residence for more than a year in Amherst, Massachusetts.

  You can laugh at such legal formalities, such bourgeois convention, of course flamboyant young poets like Serena Dayinka laugh at such things but there is a time (Serena knows, recalling the distraught example of her mother after her father died without leaving a legally executed will) when these may be the only words that matter.

  And they are to be married, Serena had begun to tell a few friends. Impulsively she’d called her mother with whom she had not spoken in months and had not seen in more than a year. Her mother’s voice had been eager, thrilled. You could not predict Phyllis Ferguson’s behavior: though she and her youngest and most mutinous daughter had not spoken in a long time it was as if, in this matter of marrying the great man they’d been conspiring like girls on the phone every day. Will it be a public sort of wedding, Phyllis asked shamelessly, reporters, the press? Andre Gatteau was very famous, Phyllis said, she’d looked him up on the Internet and people had heard of him where she lived. (In Bethesda, Maryland.

  With Serena’s elderly grandmother. In the stolid-brick house in which Phyllis had grown up in the long-ago 1950s that held very 200 * joyce carol oates

  little interest for Serena since it fell beyond the scope of her poetry.) When was the wedding scheduled, Phyllis asked and Serena said, Late October.

  Almost shyly Phyllis asked where. Serena said Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

  Chapel Hill! North Carolina! But why, Phyllis asked, confused.

  Because she and Andre had a joint appointment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Serena explained patiently.

  Because they were moving to Chapel Hill at the end of the summer after they returned from the Prague literary festival.

  Prague! Phyllis did not even ask about Prague.

  Phyllis had not yet seen her beautiful cocoa-colored grandson in person. Phyllis had not yet held her fifteen-month grandson in her arms. So strange Serena thought it, a stab of pain between her eyes, a quick jolt of her old furious hatred for this woman, Phyllis seemed scarcely to respond when Serena spoke of her son. She’d inquired after his skin color, initially. She had not asked after him since.