Read Online Jack of Spades by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online

shiny-bald head, mild myopic eyes)—he allowed the incensed plaintiff to speak at length, and to display a battery of “evidence” she’d brought with her—yellowed, typewritten manuscripts; a dozen ledger-sized journals; several copies of books of mine, with passages annotated in red. (It was a shock, before Haider identified the books, to see the dust jacket covers at a distance, and to recognize them; to realize that these were indeed my books —as if a portion of my private life were being exposed in the courtroom by someone bent upon destroying me.) The typed manuscripts were identified by Haider as “not-yet-published” stories and chapters from novels of works-in-progress by C. W. Haider; the journals were hers, dating back to 1965, when the plaintiff was eighteen years old; the hardcover books were indeed by Andrew J. Rush, containing heavily annotated passages that, Haider was claiming, had been “stolen” from her.
    In a high-pitched theatrical voice Haider read passages from her material, and then passages from Andrew J. Rush—“You see? This is ‘theft’—‘plagi-rism.’ Not only is the scoundrel stealing my words but he is stealing from my life .”
    These wild accusations went on for some time. How painful it would have been if I’d been seated at the defense table with Elliot Grossman! As it was, my eyes filled with tears of mortification. I had heard audio books of my novels read by sympathetic professionals but I had never heard my prose read aloud in such an accusatory and derisive way; the carefully constructed phrases, the “clever” similes, the unusual words ( claustral, sere ) selected from my battered old Writer’s Thesaurus now seemed to me pathetic, self-conscious preening. Not only was Haider accusing me of plagiarizing her prose but the prose itself, exposed to the bemused audience in the courtroom, was achingly bad.
    Haider’s voice rose shrilly: “As these works of C. W. Haider he has pillaged have not yet been published it is clear that the scoundrel broke into my house, that is to say my late father Walter Haider’s house, at 88 Tumbrel Place, to steal them by some photocopying device . . .”
    In the courtroom, ripples of laughter. What a nightmare!
    Grossman was right, it had been a terrible mistake to come here. I thought— It was Jack of Spades who brought me here. In the future I must avoid giving in to the impulsive and anarchic impulses of Jack of Spades.
    At last Judge Carson cut the plaintiff off in mid-sentence, noting that she had made her point several times. He urged Grossman to respond—“Concisely, please.”
    It was Grossman’s contention that the case was absurd prima facie —the defendant Andrew J. Rush was a “distinguished, long-established master of the mystery genre” whose published work dated back to the late 1980s; Rush was the “bestselling author” of twenty-eight mystery novels translated into that many, or more, languages; indeed, Rush was a local citizen known for his civic involvement and his philanthropy. If there appeared to be “parallels” and “echoes” of the plaintiff’s prose in Rush’s prose, as the plaintiff had read it to the court, it was not clear that the plaintiff’s prose preceded the defendant’s prose, for the plaintiff had not published her work, and could offer no provable dates of composition. “Theft of a private life” could hardly be proven in any case, for nothing in Rush’s novels was evidently, obviously, or literally traceable to the plaintiff’s private life; if there were “coincidences” that was all that they were—“coincidences.” Thus, Grossman moved to dismiss.
    Furiously Haider objected that the journals were indeed “dated”—by her; and a scientific laboratory could “date” the manuscripts if there was any doubt. Grossman retorted that the journals were only dated “in the plaintiff’s own hand”—and until a reputable scientific laboratory dated the manuscripts