Guilt by Association (18 page)

Demelza shrugged. “Different people—different reasons,” she said. “Some do it because it’s fashionable, some because it’s illegal, some because they’ve become dependent. Most of
the people I know do it because, for a little while, at least, it makes the pain go away.”

The doctors had given Karen medicine in the hospital after her “accident” and she could still remember how it made the pain of her broken body subside. She wondered if the drugs that Demelza was talking about worked the same way.

“What kind of pain do they have?” she asked.

“Not the kind I think you’re thinking about,” the older woman replied. “Street drugs aren’t for toothaches and back strain.
I was referring to the pain of living.”

“The pain of living.” Karen had never heard that before. She tucked the phrase into the back of her mind. Demelza never spoke of it again, but Karen never forgot.

Dinner was ready by the time Arlene arrived home from the university. Although no one would ever be likely to call Karen a gourmet cook, she had at least mastered the basics.

“Chef salad, iced tea, and French bread from the bakery,” she announced as her roommate passed the kitchen doorway. “I couldn’t bear the thought of turning on the oven.”

Arlene grunted her approval, dropped her books on the dining table, and was shedding her clothes before she even reached the bedroom.

“Look at me,” she cried fifteen minutes later, dripping from the shower, her long blond hair bound up in a towel. “Soaking wet and sticky all over.”

“I’ll call maintenance again,” Karen promised.

“If they can put a man on the moon,” Arlene fretted, referring to the incredible event they had recently watched on television,
“why can’t they make an air conditioner work?”

Karen pushed her roommate’s books to one side and set two places at the huge oak table with claw feet they had found at a secondhand store. In fact, the whole apartment was done in what Arlene dubbed Early Salvation Army. The overstuffed sofa and wing chairs were comfortable, if faded; the end tables were solid, if chipped; the bureaus were roomy, if warped; and the dining chairs were sturdy, if plain. But the two girls had had a lot of fun picking out each piece.

They were halfway through their salads when Karen said, as casually as she could, “Have you ever taken drugs?”

Arlene bit into a crusty piece of bread. “What kind of drugs?” she asked. “Aspirin? Sleeping pills? Or the mind-control stuff we give the patients at Bellevue?”

“No, I mean street drugs. Like marijuana.”

“I tried pot once,” Arlene nodded. “Years ago.”

“What was it like?”

Arlene shrugged. “I guess it wasn’t very special. I barely remember, and I’ve had no great urge to do it again.”

“The effect you got… was it like drinking alcohol?” Lately, and in private, Karen had been learning a great deal about the numbing effects of alcohol.

“No, it was nothing at all like that. Actually, it was nothing much of anything, as I recall. When you drink booze, you usually get fuzzy and your senses get dulled. When you do pot, you’re supposed to get a real high. You don’t lose awareness, so I’m told, you gain it. Why?”

“I’ve been invited to a party tomorrow night,” Karen informed her. “And I think there’ll be drugs there.”

“A party?” Arlene couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice because Karen rarely accepted invitations.

“Demelza’s having a few people to her place for dinner and she invited me. We’re even closing the Bookery early.”

“And she smokes pot?”

“I’m not really sure about that,” Karen replied, “but I know her friends do and some of them are bound to be there.”

“Well, if you’re asking for advice,” Arlene said, “I’d say, don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”

“I
am
a little curious,” Karen admitted. “You know, to find out what it’s like.”
The pain of living,
she thought to herself.

Arlene picked up her glass of iced tea. “Well then,” she said with a careless shrug, “go for it.”

L
ong after Arlene had fallen asleep, Karen lay awake in the I humid darkness, listening to the arrhythmic clanking of the air conditioner and thinking about dinner at Demelza’s.

If she chose, she could count the number of parties she had attended in New York City over the past four years on one hand and have fingers left over. Her social life consisted mostly of a dinner out now and then, several movies, one or two Broadway shows, and an occasional concert at Lincoln Center, usually in the company of Jill or Arlene or Demelza.

She had a ready excuse for every man who tried to date her, and after a while even the most persistent stopped asking. If she occasionally caught herself yearning for male companionship, she had only to reflect that few men were interested in friendship at arm’s length. With the advent of the contraceptive pill, “free love” was the catchword on everyone’s lips. Even casual dating meant obligatory sex—with all communication carried on between the sheets.

What a different world it was, she thought with a sigh, and drifted off to sleep thinking about Peter Bauer.

A brief, apologetic note had arrived at the house on Knightsbridge Road a little over a year after the picnic at
Steppingstone Park, wishing Karen well and telling her of his impending marriage.

“I wonder what took him so long,” Beverly sniffed.

The nightmare woke her just before dawn and she lay in her bed, sweat-soaked and shivering, until the familiar panic began to subside. It was always the same—something evil chasing her through a thick fog until she couldn’t make her feet run anymore,
and then the heavy hand reaching out to grasp her by the throat and cut off her life.

She took several deep breaths to settle her heart and thought about trying for another hour of sleep, but fantasies of Demelza’s Greenwich Village loft kept her awake. Karen had never been inside a real Village apartment, and she couldn’t wait to see what one was like.

Demelza had described her place as a cross between a church and a brothel. It was a fair assessment. The dirty brick building on Bleecker Street had once been a ribbon factory. Visitors reached the loft by means of a rickety self-service elevator with a heavy wooden gate that had to be raised and lowered manually. Karen arrived to find some two dozen of the Bookery regulars already there. She stepped out of the elevator and stood openmouthed at the edge of the single enormous room.

Exposed brick Walls alternated with giant arched windows, and the vaulted ceiling was at least twenty feet high. One section of the loft was furnished with Victorian velvet sofas and ornate side tables, another had two massive pews squaring off over a refectory table, and a third was strewn with half a dozen mattresses, heaped with colorful pillows. Each section was separated by a curtain of beads suspended by wires from the ceiling. Candles burned everywhere, and in the mixture of odors Karen detected the familiar scent of incense. It was different, bohemian, more than a little bizarre, and it suited Demelza perfectly.

“You made it,” the hefty hostess cried, descending on Karen with a highball in one hand and a plate of crudit6s in the other.
“Welcome to my heaven on earth.”

“This is fantastic,” Karen said, searching for the right adjective. “It’s so, well, it’s so … eclectic.”

“Actually, I think you could call it MGM Extravagant,” Demelza replied. “And it took years of careful planning.”

“It’s definitely you.”

“Well, don’t just stand there and gawk,” the Bookery owner urged, taking her guest’s bulky coat. “Take a deep breath and jump on in. You know everybody.”

Obediently, Karen took a few steps forward.

“Hey, Karen,” someone said immediately.

“Hey, Ethan.” She smiled at the slightly off-balanced skeleton beside her.

“You look different,” Ethan observed shyly. “Not like you do at the shop.”

Karen glanced down at the simple blue cotton skirt and loose-fitting, high-collared blouse she had worn to work.

“It must be the clothes,” she teased.

“Exactly,” Ethan agreed. “You know, your skirt matches your eyes. And your eyes are the color of a cloudless sky.”

Her eyes were more the color of a stormy sky, but she smiled at him anyway. Ethan came from Nebraska, she knew, and was on his way to Canada. He was a regular at the Bookery and rather bashful, hovering as he did on the fringe of the group. But he managed to screw up enough courage to test her knowledge of the shop’s inventory on a daily basis. Not more than eighteen,
with straight straw-colored hair that he kept pushing out of green eyes, something about him always reminded her of a lost puppy.

“My momma’s cornflowers are the same bright blue,” he told her, “and they grow clean up to the sky.”

“Sounds lovely.”

He sighed wistfully. “I sure hope I get to see them again someday.”

“I hope you do, too.”

“But it probably won’t be till after my daddy dies.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“He threw me out—called me a coward and threw me out. He said he didn’t have a son no more.”

“Because you didn’t want to go to Vietnam?”

“Yeah.” Ethan shook his head sadly. “He lost a leg on Guadalcanal. I just don’t know how he’s running the factory without me.”

She could see his pain and wondered how many families across the country were being destroyed by this war of somebody else’s that so many young men didn’t want to fight.

Ethan pulled out a ragged kind of cigarette and lit it “Wanna hit?” he offered after several deep puffs.

Karen knew what it was. She took a half step back.

“No,” she said firmly. “No, thank you.”

Ethan grinned. “Demelza said you were a virgin. I didn’t believe her.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She said you’d never used grass.”

“Why didn’t you believe her?” Karen asked.

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “There’s just something about you—a look in your eyes, maybe, that says you’ve been there and back.”

“You know,
you’re
different here than at the Bookery, too,” she told him, neatly changing the subject. “Much more open.” She nodded at the joint.
“Is it because of that?”

“I guess so,” he replied, taking another hit. “It sort of smooths out the edges and makes everything mellow.”

Karen wondered how it would feel to be mellow. She tried to recall an occasion in the past, but more and more, her memory of that other life was fading into nothingness.

“What’s it like,” she asked, “to be mellow?”

“It’s like wearing rose-colored glasses to a horror flick,” he replied.

“Marijuana makes you feel like that?”

He offered the joint. “Don’t take my word for it”

This time she was tempted. “Maybe later,” she said. “Right now, I’m hungry.”

“The food’s behind that screen,” Ethan directed. “On the other side of the pew.”

Karen found the kitchen and soon had a plate heaped with salade niçoise and moussaka. A bottle of ouzo went with the
meal. She filled a glass and wandered into the living room, sitting on one of the Victorian sofas. The party drifted around her—long gauzy skirts, flowing shirts, safari shorts, beads, sandals. People stopped to chat about the food or the heat wave or Demelza’s outrageous home. Karen began to feel as relaxed here as she did at the Bookery.

A few of the guests were drinking ouzo, as she was, but most were passing pot around the way Karen and Jill used to pass photographs.
Two of them were already sprawled on a mattress at the other end of the loft. It wasn’t until she saw them shedding their clothes that Karen realized what they were doing and she blushed and turned away.

“Isn’t this just the most fantastic party?” Ethan cried, plopping down beside her.

“You bet,” Karen agreed.

“For a small-town boy like me,” he said, taking a hit, “New York is right out of Oz. I’m going to miss it when I go. I don’t think they have anything like this in Canada.”

“Maybe you’ll come back someday,” she suggested.

“Maybe I will, if you’re still here,” he said, the weed making him bold. “I guess you know I have this crush on you.”

“No, I didn’t,” she replied with genuine surprise.

“Gosh, everybody else knows,” he asserted. “I thought for sure you did, too. I mean, the way I’m always hanging around you at the shop and everything.”

“I thought you were interested in books.”

“I wouldn’t know Henry James from James Michener,” he confessed sheepishly. “I just like talking to you.”

“I’m very flattered,” she said sincerely. Ethan had always behaved perfectly properly and she didn’t feel the least bit threatened by his admission. He was still the lost puppy who waited hopefully for someone to toss him a bone.

“Don’t you feel a little funny?” he asked her.

“About what?”

“Well, for one thing,” he said with a grin, “you’re the only one here tonight who’s sober.”

Surprised, Karen looked at the other guests—except, of course, for the two on the mattress at the other end of the loft.
She had consumed almost a whole glass of ouzo and hardly considered herself sober.

“I am?” she whispered. “How can you tell?”

“Easy,” he giggled. “We’re all bent one way or another. If you were any straighter, you’d break.”

“Is ‘bent’ another word for mellow?” she asked.

“Not exactly, but close,” he conceded.

More than once, Karen had taken a bottle to bed with her but she would not have described the experience as mellowing.

He held out his joint. “See for yourself.”

Curiosity got the better of her. She took the butt and put it between her index and middle fingers as smokers did.

“What do I do?” she whispered

“First of all, you gotta hold it right,” he instructed, repositioning the joint between her thumb and forefinger. “Okay, now go ahead and pull on it, just like a Marlboro.”

“I’ve never smoked a regular cigarette,” she admitted.

“Oh,” he said, momentarily confounded. “Well then, you close your mouth around one end and suck on it real hard and take a deep breath all at the same time.”

Karen did as she was told. Even before the smoke hit her lungs, her insides rebelled, her face turned beet-red, her eyes watered,
and she barely avoided losing her dinner.