Braided Lives (67 page)

“Did you ever see him?”

“Howie? No. We mourned him so thoroughly. It was all talked out.”

“Because he was a hero.”

“After somebody’s dead you think of them as always dead, as if the story wouldn’t have come out all different if he’d not gone out that night and fallen into the ambush. The call said a sick child and the Klan was laying for him at the crossroads with shotguns as if murdering Howie could make a generation content to be pissed on. Now they’re all over the papers again.”

“You should say all that to her.”

“I guess so. I always think the young ones know more than they do.”

I was making paella for supper when she asked me, “Did you and my father ever get together again after he married my mother? I mean, weren’t you ever lovers again?”

I stirred and stirred the rice as it became translucent. “You know, Stephanie never asked me that. How come you ask?”

“From the letters, I wondered. Didn’t you ever do it?”

Only the living hurt; the dead don’t worry what you say about them. Their ears are full of mud. “No. I would’ve, but he was too loyal to Stephanie. He loved her too much.”

She fixed me with a level skeptical gaze in which too I could read something of her father. “He wasn’t too loyal to have an affair with Aunt Sarah.”

“It wasn’t an affair. They were working together and they were in danger together.”

“Mmmm.” She stared at me, lowering her chin. “You people were all crazy, weren’t you?”

“Honey, we were the sane ones. We still are.” I tasted my seasoning and added a few more threads of saffron. Alberta and clan were coming to supper and I determined to enlist Alberta in a history lesson. I began to get excited. I bet I had that old clasped-hand SNCC button in a drawer someplace and the song-books. I bet she doesn’t even know SNCC was the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. “This Little Light of Mine.” If only Alberta still played her
banjo. “In the fifties we were all a little crazy, but we’ve been getting clearer and clearer ever since.” Even Josh didn’t have a grasp of the political history of the early sixties. For Alberta and me to share our common web of work and friendship with Karlie, with Josh, with her own kids, would be the best home movies we could dream up. And the paella was going to be superb.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

O
NE,
T
WO,
T
HREE,
M
ANY

S
O WE PASS the night and Labor Day morning able to be gentle and inventive and curious now that the violent closing has torn the modesty long knit between us. I know too as I touch the corners of his wide mouth that we still ride the wave of impetus, before the slack when we have to talk. This shall be an only time, or else it represents the end of whatever innocence impulse can claim. No matter what happens, the sun has come into my flesh. I bask in his arms. Behind his half-closed eyes, a glint of milky blue-grey in the light spilling over us, a decision is made and I resign myself to it even as I argue and wheedle and promise with my body. From the ledge Minouska contemplates us. I want to incorporate this joining whole, drink it through my pores and reassemble it, already memory as it happens.

Finally we rise. I could sacrifice a boar to him, decapitate an ox. I only make scrambled eggs, toast, drip coffee. He sits back from his breakfast yawning. Suddenly his posture stiffens. “Forgot to use anything! Is it too late?”

I have always told him the truth. This would be a poor time to stop. “I have an evil mind. I put in my diaphragm.”

“Oh.” He squeezes his nose. “I wish you hadn’t told me. We could use the myth that it happened in the dead of night. Slambang surprise.”

“It only implied
my
readiness.”

“Gee thanks. It was a long time coming.”

With a chill of disappointment I look at his young slightly sullen morning face, realizing the decision I had imagined in his eyes is unmade. Thus far I have come with at least the shadow of Stephanie’s permission, the evening, the impulse. To ask more is to take what she would not permit if she could stop me. Nor am I sure I can reach him. I step around the table. “Surely you’ve made me pay for every bit of blindness, every bit and then some.”

With a grunt deep in his chest he takes me on his lap and rocks me against him, hiding his face in my breasts. I feel rather than see the grimace that pulls it rigid. His breath touches me through the cotton. I stroke his sandy hair, thick and coarse as dune grass, curly as moss. A beach where we will go today to lie under the sky and stare at the lashing water.

Tomorrow his classes begin. Tomorrow I call my temporary agency for my next assignment. Tomorrow we resume or we abstain. Today we pack a picnic lunch and ride the subway out to Rockaway, through Brooklyn and across the marshland. The day is flat and intense, like a photograph of itself, an effect of intense color and hollowness, not of emptiness but of strangeness, as if the little houses were secretly filled with arcane light, a sense I will associate years later with acid and with danger.

Everything moves me. Everything is pregnant with words we do not say. There is an aura of silence about us as we move through the slow afternoon past the trim, the gaudy little houses, through the sands littered with thousands of bodies in little scraps of latex and nylon. We walk in a magnetic field of intense lust. His body has become sex to me. I feel as if my cunt were full of warm honey all the time. Every touch jostles me into wanting. The center of gravity in my body is about two feet lower than usual, right in my crotch. I am so distant from the practical, the day is almost over before I think to ask him why he didn’t drive last night, and learn of the death of his car the week after his move. It threw a rod, and he stripped it of identification and plates and reported an abandoned vehicle. He feels guilty, of course.

When we stickily part Monday evening, exhausted with sex and talking about everything but what we are to do, I work on a poem. I write, rewrite, work through draft after draft.

Rockaway Beach, Long Island

1.
The Town

On Rockaway Beach, bargained from the sea

by timely dumping of ancestral garbage,

jostling for space the houses preen,

rococo cages decked by lonely wives.

More birdbaths than birds adorn the tiny yards

with cookie cutter shrubs instead of trees.

The retired rock on tiers of porches

watching the couples pass down to the sea.

They sit into the dusk. Their faces hang

waning in the gloom like wrinkled moons.

Cards are fanned out under table lamps

along the rows of humid living rooms.

Talk somnolent as honeysuckle

thickens the air and drowns

      the sound

            of waves.

It goes on to 2.
The Beach
and 3.
The Amusement Park.
I work it over and over, wanting it to say something that I cannot force it to mean. I write the objective, observational poem I have been taught, carefully ironic and containing nothing of what burns a hole in my body like a sun shut up in a paper bag.

Tuesday passes. I go to work in midtown. I come home and rewrite my Rockaway sequence some more.

Wednesday passes. I come home and Howie is sitting on my stoop. As soon as we walk into my apartment, he throws his arms around me, before I have time to put down my big canvas purse, convenient for carrying off supplies. As we kiss it falls on my foot. In about two minutes our clothes join it on the floor.

Just as well he is a medical student. Just as well or I’d be sore all the time and get nothing done. The last thing I expected was that under the conversation and the political work and the friendship runs this immense river of lust. Neither of us knows quite what to make of this vast powerful sweating body we become together. We spend a lot of time in bed. Then we feel guilty. We cuddle and stroke and caress and fuck. We fuck for a long time. We fuck two or three times in a sequence of night and morning. Then we run off from each other to the rest of our lives, a little frightened.

As I do my marketing, suddenly I have to be careful of men. I have never before had trouble, walking quickly, sidling through the city like a cat through the labyrinth of courts and alleys. But now I dawdle, float. I exude something that is dangerous. Fortunately the weather is crispening. I can wear my old suede jacket or a raincoat.

Today, early October Wednesday I am not working and the sun is hot and rough on my arms and face as I return from the market. Howie has given my body back to me. I feared Mike’s boast: that only in that tortured dominance would I ever love and enjoy fully. An obscure dispensation allots the full orgasm here and not there; denied importance when it’s missing; largely beyond control; when it’s given, like a sun of amoral rightness crowning my acts. I feel complacent with sweet roundness like a pear.

Coming home with my shopping bags heavy with yellow apples, purple broccoli they call cauliflower, white fillets of flounder, bouquets of ruby lettuce, I see at once angling into a small parking space up the block, the white Sprite. My heart catches, a phonograph needle hitting on a scratch. I sink on the stoop with my packages and wait for her to arrive.

She wears a cobalt blue sheath almost too tight to walk in, giving her a hip-heavy waddle as if she were a much bigger-bodied woman than she is. She is no longer slender, not overweight but filled out, squinting at me in the shadow of the stoop. She takes off her sunglasses and I see they are only sunglasses, not the prescription lenses of before. “It’s me,” I say, wondering if she can recognize me without her glasses.

“Waiting for your true love, Stu?”

“Or a bus. Or something. Maybe you.”

She follows me up the steps, at about half my pace in the hobbling skirt. Inside, she surveys everything. “I love your place.”

“You won’t lecture me on living here? All our friends from college faint when they see it. They won’t come east of Fifth.”

“I love this neighborhood. I envy you, Stu.” She sits at my table as I put away groceries.

“But you’re here now too. Obviously you made it.”

“Well, yes. I won. But the trouble is, New York State isn’t New York City. I never knew how long Long Island is. I mean, do you grasp it? Have you ever been out there, in the great beyond? It must stretch halfway to Maine. Hours and hours of bumper-to-bumper late-model cars and jowl-by-jowl tract houses.”

“You’re out in the suburbs somewhere?”

“Oh, you got it, kiddo.”

“In one of those houses that look like all the others.”

“You think that’s a joke, something from the Malvina Reynolds song, ‘Little Boxes.’ No, we have an apartment in an apartment complex. Not a real apartment like this. It’s my mama’s dream come true. Everything’s electric. They haven’t yet got those windows like in Peter’s father’s Cadillac where you press a button and they go up and down, but that’s ‘cause the windows don’t open at all. It’s air-conditioned. You don’t even have garbage, like ordinary people. There’s a machine in the kitchen that eats it. You wash it down the sink and it makes this dreadful suffering noise and grinds it up. And a dishwasher. Even Peter’s mother doesn’t have that—just a Negro maid.” Her voice and gesture rise and dip with a mixture of enjoyment and dismay.

I ask, “But what do you do?”

“I play the machines. I put the garbage in the disposal and the dishes in the dishwasher and take the laundry to the laundromat. I play house.”

“He works and you keep house?”

“Don’t look at me that way. It’s every bit as boring as you imagine. I thought I’d be in the city and I could spend a hundred years just going to museums and galleries and concerts. But Peter and I are both in analysis. Peter’s analyst is out near Stony Brook, but mine is on Park Avenue. God, my analyst, he’s intense. I adore him. He shines in the dark, Stu. Transference, phooey, I worship him! Besides that I find him one of the most stunning minds I’ve ever encountered, it gives me an excuse for coming into the city three times a week…. Do you think I should go back to school, Stu?”

“In what?”

“Oh, physics maybe. Or psychology.” She grimaces, idly patting Minouska, who has settled beside her. “I don’t want to. I want something real to do.”

“Donna, have you ever felt sexually besotted? Just obsessed with making love with somebody till you felt slightly nuts?”