JOYCE CAROL OATES
577
It throws you back uponyourself, the starveling little core ofyourself The
aloneness.
Cecilia thinks of her assailant, who was not quite visible to her,
but irrevocably real. Oh yes real enough- convincing in
his
physi–
cality. She will never know his name, his age, his background;
whether he is married; has children; is in fact considered a "nice guy"
when not aroused to sexual rage. (He had been drinking too, Cecilia
recalls the odor of beer, his hot panting breath, the smell of him.)
She will never know whether he felt any legitimate pleasure in per–
forming his furtive act upon her, or any remorse afterward . Whether
in fact he even remembered what he'd done, afterward. Did men
remember such things?
The German prostitutes were so young, no more than seven–
teen or eighteen, surely. And so blond, so pretty. Cecilia sees them
vividly in her mind's eye, she notes their blue jeans, their absurd
high heels, their tight-fitting jersey blouses, their unzipped satin
jackets-one crimson, the other lemon yellow. She notes their glow–
ing faces, their red mouths, the drunken teetering in the street, the
clapping of hands (had the black soldier's antics genuinely amused
them, or was their response merely part of the transaction?), the
streaming blond hair.
The starveling little core ofyourself,
Cecilia thinks.
The aloneness.
The evidence Cecilia Heath will not provide, either to Philip
Schoen or to the authorities: while Philip spent the afternoon at the
Johannes Gutenberg University, speaking with graduate students in
the American Studies Department, Cecilia, grateful to be alone,
spent the time in the Mainz Museum (paintings by Nolde, Otto Dix,
Otto Moll which she admired enormously), in the Gutenberg
Museum (a sombre, rather penitential sort of shrine, but extremely
interesting) , and in a noisy pub on the Kaiserstr. where , believing
herself friendly and well-intentioned, she struck up a conversation of
sorts with six or seven black soldiers.
It's true that such cheery gregarious behavior is foreign to
Cecilia Heath. She is usually shy with strangers; even with ac–
quaintances; she spends an insomniac night before giving a public
lecture, or meeting with her university classes for the first time;
someone once advised her- not meaning to be unkind- that she
might see a psychotherapist to help her with her "phobia." Yet for
some reason, here in Mainz, liberated for a long sunny afternoon
from Philip, she must have thought it would be ... charitable,
magnanimous . . . the sort of thing one of her maiden aunts might
do in such circumstances:
How areyou, where areyoufrom, how long have
