American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

rather unnervingly intense, parenthesis within the long romance of their friendship. (Has it been fifteen years since the McCulloughs came to Hazelton? It seems impossible.) The affair had begun innocently enough when, in Ian’s absence, Denis drove Glynnis home from a party. A kiss, then kisses, and she’d invited him in for a drink; and, next morning, as she’d known he would do, Denis called. You know I love you, Glynnis. I haven’t slept all night. Please let me see you. You must let me see you . In all, Glynnis supposes they made love, in the fullest sense of the word, less than a dozen times, charged with adolescent fervor and an adulterous sense of guilt. She remembers, dreamily, one vertiginous summer day when, at the zenith of the affair, she made love with Denis in his air-conditioned office at the Institute, on his couch, and reappeared no more than fifteen minutes later, in Ian’s company, to have lunch with him and Denis and one or two of their Institute colleagues, on the outdoor terrace of the dining room. And later that afternoon she’d dropped by the Grinnells’ house to see Roberta, at that time, as now, Glynnis’s closest woman friend. How high she’d been, those days, on her own bravado, her own daring, her astonishment at such behavior. Am I really doing these things? Is it I, Glynnis, who is capable of such duplicity?
    She had known, then, that absolute trust in another human being is an error. We believe, not what is true, but what we wish to perceive as true.
    But the affair ended, as precipitously and emotionally as it had begun. And Glynnis was the one to break it off, thus retaining, in both her imagination and Denis’s, a certain measure of advantage.
    The discussion of crime, violence, police, et cetera, still continues; Glynnis hears herself say, quite feelingly, in response to a question, “Yes, I still have nightmares about it. I don’t know if what they did was really harassment or, as they insisted, a mistake”—“Of course it was harassment,” Malcolm says—“but it made me realize how vulnerable we are, how helpless, in a house like this—in any of our houses, I suppose—people like us who don’t own weapons, and don’t want to own weapons. I suppose you could say,” Glynnis continues, pleased at her own eloquence at this table of articulate and assertive people, who frequently interrupt one another in their eagerness to speak, “that, in an equation in which others are assailants, people like us are inevitably victims.”
    This provokes Vincent Hawley and Meika Cassity, who do not, they declare, want to be victims; what does Glynnis mean, people like us? But Roberta agrees with Glynnis; and so does, perhaps too somberly, white-haired Elizabeth Kuhn, who says that there must inevitably be situations, in human society—“in decent civilized society”—in which one simply cannot fight back, even to save one’s life; one cannot match evil with evil. And Amos, her husband, rather pointedly disagrees with her; and Denis supports Amos’s position; and Meika Cassity interjects a remark or two, closing her pretty beringed hands into fists and raising them aloft: “ I intend to resist to the death.” And they laugh, but the subject, even then, is not, to Glynnis’s annoyance, dropped; for Elizabeth, dogged in her Quaker idealism, has more to say; and Sonia Hawley, it turns out, was once, as a child, molested—“And not by a relative, either: by an older boy at school”—and Leonard Oppenheim, and Paul Owen, whose luggage was stolen on a recent trip to India, have a great deal to say; and Ian can be passionate on the subject. And so it goes.
    At what she calculates to be the proper moment, Glynnis lays down her napkin and goes out into the kitchen, returns with Marvis at her elbow, the two women bearing warm heavy plates. “Will you all have a