Jack of Spades by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

invigorate her. Irina also had our house and property to maintain, which she enjoyed, and on which she spent a considerable amount of money—(of course, with my approval); she was generous with her time at local charitable organizations, and served on various fund-raising committees. There is no term that so sinks the heart of a husband as fund-raiser— but I have tried to be supportive of her in these efforts. I have always wanted my dear wife, who is inclined to emotional moods and “melancholia,” to be productively happy.
    At the same time, I don’t want Irina’s good nature to be exploited by others.
    “If anyone is going to exploit you, darling, it should be me .”
    With a little wince Irina laughed. I leaned over to kiss her warm cheek and felt her stiffen just slightly for Irina does not always like my jocular side, as she describes it.
    When we’d first met at Rutgers, as undergraduates, it had certainly seemed that we were equals; in fact, Irina’s grades were higher than mine. In our writing workshops, which we’d happened to take together, it was Irina Kacinzk with her “poetic” prose in the mode of Virginia Woolf whom the other writers and our instructor most admired, and not Andy Rush whose Hemingway-derived stories were flatly written, awkwardly earnest, and plot-driven with melodramatic “action” scenes and Hollywood-type dialogue. The first story of Irina’s I’d read, about a deaf, dumb, and blind girl, brilliantly evoked and convincing, made a powerful impression on me. I’d thought, with the naïveté of a nineteen-year-old— Here is the girl I will marry.
    It did not matter to me that, in our workshop, Irina was often too shy to speak; and that, among other young women at Rutgers, she was not strikingly attractive or sexually provocative, but rather quietly appealing, with ashy blond hair, wire-rimmed glasses, intense eyes. An intelligent person—obviously. The kind of person who must be cultivated, to be appreciated and who is, if female, grateful for the interest of one with a stronger personality than her own.
    Of the numerous girls I’d known, none had seemed to be so impressed with me as Irina. In her eyes the Andy Rush who was reflected scarcely seemed, at times, to be me.
    “Irina? Call me ‘Andy,’ please.”
    “‘I think that I would rather call you ‘Andrew.’”
    This was flattering, somehow. For everyone I knew called me “Andy”—a name comfortable as an old sneaker. There was dignity in “Andrew,” and a kind of depth, complexity. Perhaps I began to fall in love with Irina Kacinzk for seeing more in me than I saw in myself at the time.
    Of course, from time to time, Irina has called me “Andy.” In her most affectionate moments, when she feels comfortable in my love, she even calls me “dear”—“darling.”
    But it is “Andrew” that is most natural to her for it seems to suggest a slight distance between us: “Andrew” the husband, father, protector and provider.
    Soon after we were married, Irina gave up writing. I had been her most enthusiastic reader and had continued to encourage her, going through drafts of stories and novels, but something hesitant and self-doubting had crept into her sense of herself as a writer. Gently I admonished her—“Darling, you care too much for precision and perfection. There’s no need to polish each damned sentence—just say what you want to say .”
    But Irina grew ever more shy about her writing. I hope it wasn’t because I insisted upon reading everything she wrote, and offering my heartfelt, sincere, and sympathetic critiques.
    Though we’d begun as equals, to a degree, both of us finding teaching jobs in the Highland Park area, Irina’s salary from the start was less than mine; her high grades at Rutgers and the great enthusiasm of her professors didn’t so much matter outside the university. Many times in those early, strained years I had to assure Irina that it didn’t matter in the