Read Online Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online

station wagon, looking for a parking space, turning the clumsy vehicle around tight turns, ascending to the next parking level, and to the next. Was this a joke, a comedy! Was her life a farce, others might observe with scorn! Yet she managed to find a place to park, always you manage somehow. She locked the station wagon, a chill wind blowing at her face, her legs. Tugging at her black cashmere coat, like teasing fingers. Then in the slow clanking elevator descending to street level, ugly graffiti at which she could not look. She was thinking This is a mistakeof course. In the hilly suburban village in which she lived there was no graffiti.
    If you don’t mind a married woman, she’d joked with him. Her voice had been bold, wistful. He’d only laughed.
    It was a windy walk to the Renaissance Plaza by the river. A fierce white sun, though half the sky was massed storm clouds. So close to the great Midwestern lake north of the city, the sky was likely to be unpredictable, one hour to the next. There was sun, later there might be sleet, then a warm rain. The Plaza was elevated above the street, there were numerous steps, revolving doors. There was a symphony hall, there were restaurants, high-rise apartment buildings, a luxury hotel. Limousines, airport shuttle buses moving slowly forward. At once she began to feel more at home, doormen recognized women like her, bellboys, security guards. If she was not a guest at the hotel, she resembled its guests. Good day, ma’am! the uniformed men called to her. They were dusky-skinned like Ismelda, their smiles flashed white. She was a beautiful woman, at a distance you saw this. A beautifully sculpted black coat, black fur collar. Her shoes were expensive, her leather gloves. She wore dark glasses she’d fumbled to slip onto her face. She carried a leather handbag, finely stitched. The uniformed doorman smiled at her as she passed into the revolving door, in the corner of her eye she saw his smile begin to fade immediately, she felt his scorn for her, she had to be mistaken.
    She could be a guest here certainly! More likely, she was meeting friends for a late lunch. A business lunch, she was a woman who belonged to numerous committees. Her father served on corporate boards, he was a trustee of his former university, both her parents were civic-minded, responsible. Only this once she would be unfaithful to her husband, and to her children, it would never happen again.
    He, the man, was to be in room 2133. She did not think of him as an individual with a name, she did not think his name to herself, only just he , him . Without apparent haste or agitation she crossed to the bank of elevators, sleek glass cubicles that lifted and fell soundlessly through theimmense open space of the hotel’s atrium. At midday the hotel lobby was crowded, festive. There was a convention of hairstylists, another of radiologists. There was recorded harp music. There were terraces of Easter lilies, tulips. Potted ferns the size of small trees. A noisily trickling fountain. Like a woman in a spell she stepped into the glass elevator, she was sucked up into the interior of the hotel as if into a vacuum. Still she was thinking I can turn back at any time.
    How distant her other life seemed to her, where she was Mommy.
    That morning the children had behaved strangely, as if sensing her mood. She’d laid her hand against their foreheads that seemed slightly overwarm, damp. The little girl had been fretful, uncooperative while being dressed. The little boy had complained of bad dreams. She would keep them home, she thought. For April, it was such a raw wet windy day. She and Ismelda and the children would make Easter eggs as they’d done the year before. Yet somehow she’d hurried them through breakfast, she’d driven them to school as usual. If they came down with colds, if they had fevers that evening, it would be her fault.
    Ismelda had been born in Manila, she belonged to an