Déjà Vu

Abstract

Joyce Carol Oates 53 DÉJÀ VU / Joyce Carol Oates There was a young woman in the department, Eve, whom no one knew well. She was slightly older than the other students— twenty-six, twenty-seven. Married, with a bachelor's degree from an Eastern college, very tall, very thin, her dark hair pulled back severely from her angular face and fastened into a careless knot at the nape of her neck. Her cheekbones were prominent, her eyes were almondshaped , her nose long and straight, her skin dead-white. Since September she had been wearing a remarkably soiled khaki raincoat that fell to mid-calf. It had enormous pockets. She stuffed books and papers and gloves into them, never carried a handbag. Why did people dislike her, I wondered, staring at her from a doorway. For weeks I teased myself with the faint flicker of interest I felt in her presence. She was a beautiful young woman despite her prim, impatient, arrogant expression, and perhaps the others could not forgive her for being so indifferent to her own beauty. There was something perverse about her, one could see it, sense it. I could sense it. In the late afternoons of winter no one else was around. I forced myself onto her. I stood in the doorway to the graduate students' common room and talked with her, not minding her curt, embarrassed replies to my questions. By5:30 the department had emptied out and yet she remained at her corner desk beneath the glaring fluorescent lights, smoking cigarettes, sipping coffee from a red plastic mug, correcting student themes or reading. If I asked how her work was going she shrugged her shoulders and murmured something unintelligible . If I asked what she was reading she would say, "Oh nothing—nothing in particular." I recognized the paperback edition of the selected poems of Yeats one time, and another time the Nocturne oí Auguste Béguin. "Your name is SiIz," I said one day. "My husband's name," she said. "Eve SiIz." From a distance of several yards I could see that her eyes were colorless. And faintly mocking, jeering. "Aren't you terribly bored here, Eve," I said gently. "Wouldn't you like to go somewhere this afternoon . . .?" She hunched over the aluminum desk, she gripped a pencil as if about to write. But it was a pretense. Though she stared at a student theme she was not seeing it. 54 THEMISSOURIREVIEW "You don't wear a wedding ring, Mrs. SiIz," I said. She had locked her legs together somehow, crossed tightly, with one ankle caught about a chair rung. Like the other students she wore boots and faded jeans; but her sweater—too short in the sleeves, and stained at the cuffs—was cashmere. I remembered having heard that her family was wealthy. "You're bored," I said. "You're lonely. You're a sleepwalker like me." And so it came about that the long featureless twilit days were interrupted by my conversations with Eve. And our friendship. Morning sifted as always into afternoon into dusk into evening and there was no reprise, and no way out, yet in her presence my ennui lifted for brief periods of time. "Your're my salvation, Eve," I told her frequently. But always in jest. We spent a great deal of time in bookstores. We spent a great deal of time because we had so much time. Amidst the rows of brightly colored books we wandered deeply absorbed, innocent as children. Eve had a queer hunger for books, a curiosity about nearly anything that was printed, and after the first outing it became a ritual that I would buy her whatever she had selected. Dickens's Dombey and Son, Colette's The Blue Lantern, Emerson 's Essays. Whatever. Cloth-bound or paperback. "It's very generous of you," she said, her lips stretching into an ironic smile. "But I should tell you it means very little to me. I could buy these books for myself if I wanted whenever I wanted." Her eyelashes were long and dark, the arch of her eyebrows exquisitely subtle. I had difficulty realizing that we were not already lovers—the...