Black Dahlia & White Rose by Joyce Carol Oates. You'd recognize me immediately. There's one of me in every class. The tall, thin, awkward girl in black, pale as chalk, silent as a graveyard statue, never raises a hand, never asks a question, never talks to a fellow student. I'm sitting in the back row, same as always, as near to the door as possible, the better to slip in and out unnoticed, to make my escape, as if I'm afraid this classroom, any room with people in it, is a cage that I might be trapped inside for some inexplicable reason.
All reason, being to me, inexplicable.
I don't attend this class so much as haunt it.
You recognize me by the look in my eyes. Hunted. Shadowed. Scornful. Adoring. Do I think that I'm in love with you? A schoolgirl crush? Or am I waiting for you to recognize in me a kindred spirit, as a sister-bride of Dracula? Why then do I look down into my notebook, feverishly covering pages with my pen, whenever your eyes drift in my general direction? If I were a boy you'd be wary, even a little afraid, wondering what it was I carried in the black backpack that lies at my feet like a baleful dog. A gun with which to start spraying bullets, like semen, indiscriminately, to hold the classroom hostage in unbearable suspense, an orgasm of bloodshed delayed but inevitable? A serrated hunting knife I'll use to introduce myself to you later, one-on-one, intimately, in the parking lot or after office hours as you descend alone down the concrete stairwell of a building abandoned for the day?
But I'm a girl and you know any harm I'm likely to cause, any violence I'd perpetrate, would be more than likely turned inwards, towards myself: pills, eating disorders, alcohol, risky sex with dangerous men, suicide. One look at me and you can tell I know well the canon of those who traveled this road before me, the Sylvia Plaths, the Anne Sextons, the Virginia Woolfs.
I've read your books; of course, everyone in this seminar has read them. We're all fans, devotees, acolytes, student-scholars. You notice the book I've brought with me, lying on my desk, which I will never—out of pride, shyness, simple fear of the humiliation of being turned down—ever ask you to sign. It is "Black Dahlia & White Rose." And why ask for a signature anyway? What does that convey? It's not a magic spell, no stamp of affection or approval; it's simply impersonal graffiti, impersonal, even if you personalize it with a reader's name. What could it mean to those who collect them? Is it a trophy, maybe? The kind of innocuous trophy the normal horde, but comparable—at least in our lurid imaginations, yours and mine Ms. Oates—to the grisly trophies that the serial killer prizes to remind him of his victims. The book I bring to class is not your best; you would readily admit it yourself, but it is one of your darker collections of short stories. Why that one, you wonder? Am I trying to send you a message? If so, what message might that be?
The first story in the book is a blend of fact and fiction about the savage murder and dismemberment of would-be actress Elizabeth Short, whose one and only starring role would be to play the victim, the infamous Black Dahlia; it's a crime that holds a lurid fascination even decades later, like the Jack-the-Ripper murders, and likewise unsolved to this day. In your version, Short was sharing a room with Norma Jean Baker—the White Rose, in your version of this contemporary myth--at the time of her abduction. You speculate that it might easily have been the future Marilyn Monroe who was pornographically slain instead of Short; in fact, the killer's first choice was the baby-girl blonde, it was the White Rose he wanted to pluck in the bud, but fate intervened.
The next two stories are subtler, but no less disturbing in their aura of menace, their themes of abuse and cruelty. In one, a teenage girl with an unstable mother who often disappears for days with unknown men is called out of class by two police officers; she's taken to the morgue to identify a body. In the other, it is a mother, lost in a haze of barbiturate-fueled self-centeredness, who comes to see, in a brief albeit shattering moment of clarity, how she has inadvertently prepared her daughter to accept a lifetime of mental and physical abuse.
Have I been abused? Is that what I'm trying to tell you? Well-who hasn't been abused in one form or another? You wonder about the writing assignments I've submitted for your evaluation. Could I possibly have really experienced even half the things I've written about? It wouldn't seem possible. You shudder to think it true, but people have naively wondered the same thing about you, after all. They don't understand the power of imagination, of the saintlike empathy that is essential to the craft, how you can write the wounds into your own flesh and psyche through the vividness of your identification with a victim, the way St. Francis could exhibit the stigmata. It's a fiction-writing class, after all, and you should know better than most, but I strike you as the sort of troubled writer who'd have trouble separating fact from fiction, poetry from confession.
There's a story about a man who is determined to make the most of his second chance at marriage, his chance for a do-over as a husband and a father to his two new stepchildren; but the very foundations of this new life are undermined when he innocently unearths a long-buried skeleton, damning evidence of a previous crime. Another father, a distinguished professor, is about to get the shock of his life when the long-lost illegitimate son he pressed his student-lover to abort rises from "the dead" to confront him at a graduation commencement. Apparently you don't mind if the feminists howl that you've written a story that might be construed as anti-abortion.
That kind of criticism, including the female hostility your sympathy for divorced men taken to the cleaners financially and emotionally by vengeful ex-wives, you repeatedly provoke—and scorn.
There is a story about a sparrow who's somehow become trapped inside an airport waiting area and a weary traveler (who sounds an awful lot like it must have been you) who comes to identify with the poor bird so intimately she experiences a kind of transmigration of souls in which she suddenly becomes the sparrow in its panic. In another story of animal transformation, a woman gone all but invisible in a dull, sexless marriage begins to experience the strange visitation of a "wild man" who materializes from the woods surrounding her million-dollar home; it's a twist on the werewolf theme, with spotted hyenas instead, and a rebirth of vitality in rites of violence, sex, and bloodshed.
In another story of a marriage gone flatline, a husband and wife each have separate—if unequal—midlife crises on an extended Italian vacation that ends—or climaxes—in Rome.
A pair of prison stories end the volume. Prisons and prisoners—a recurring theme in your stories. One is a weird little piece from the point of view of a physically deformed, semi-retarded convict that forces the reader into an uncomfortable position between sympathy and repulsion. "Anniversary," the final story is perhaps the least successful for the likely reason that it's probably the most personal: a widowed professor volunteers to teach an English class to men at a high-security prison. She has clearly not moved on from her husband's death two years ago to the day; in fact, she seems to have something of a death-wish herself, brought to bear in an imagined climax of blood and eroticism. Well, I guess we all mix the facts of our life with our fiction to one degree or another.
It is not me, of course, sitting at the back of this class. But the me I imagine I would be, if you had come into my life at an earlier time, when it wasn't already too late. You've announced your retirement from teaching later this year and my days as a student, at least in a formal setting, are long past; though I might still see you at a reading at a bookstore somewhere in Brooklyn; in fact, you were here only a month or two ago. It's improbable, though, as I don't like public gatherings and don't suffer them voluntarily. But it's possible; anything, I've come to learn, is possible. If our paths do cross, if should see me in the back of some room in which you're speaking, I won't be as intense as I would have been back in the days of my youth, not nearly as romantic or haunted or tragic. I won't be nearly as eager for the lover's sting of emotional cruelty or the delicious humiliation of the boot on my cheek or the erotic jolt of the razor at my throat; I've had more than my share of all that. At the end of the day, when all is said and done and written, it turns out I was a survivor, not a victim—a survivor, still writing. But I'll bet you recognize me all the same.
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