Small Changes (26 page)

From Brooklyn she had brought whatever clothes she still wanted. Allegra told her she thought Lionel would move out of the flat, and Miriam rather hoped he would. It depressed them all. Even Mark sighed and drooped there. She hung her room with dripping subtle colors, for Phil had got into tie dying. The bare bulb of the ceiling fixture in his room now was muted by a canopy of sheets dyed with golds and browns and reds. He had made a canopy for her ceiling in red and blues he said had the tonality of stained-glass windows that neither of them had ever seen. They would go and see, someday.… They went to rummage sales and the Salvation Army and Good Will on Mount Auburn to get used sheets and plain white curtains and T-shirts. All of these they tie-dyed in big spaghetti pots on the stove.

“I don’t give a shit what you brew up like witches on my stove, so long as you clean it up. I will not have cobalt blue stew poisoning me.” Jackson inspected every pot.

At home her biggest meal was of hamburgers or hot dogs, but Jackson turned out to be an exacting and inventive cook. On their meager budget he produced good soups and stews and casseroles. In the stores he watched the prices with a sharp eye. He was deeply involved in the local food co-op and always knew when they had paid too much for produce. That was a strange side to this somber man: he always knew how much everything cost. Sonia would have adored him. It piqued her how little he seemed to think of her. Most of the time he ignored her, as if she were some pickup Phil had scraped off the barroom floor.

“You’re a tight bastard, Jackson, when we come down to it. And we always do. You count pennies. You could dwindle into an old bachelor miser saving foil and old twine and with twenty thousand dollars under the mattress in crumpled singles while you tie your pants with an end of rope.” Phil leaned on the refrigerator drinking a beer, whose quality he had just been complaining of.

“Whereas you have a hole in your pocket as big as your mouth. Until we pay the rent, there’s no Tuborg or even Pabst.”

“This Old Bohemian is just Charles River water. Nice and brown.”

“Hmmm.” Jackson regarded him gravely. “I could go down with a bucket and get it directly. Do you fancy the taste of the sewage on the Boston or the Cambridge shore?”

“Aw, the Cambridge sewage is the tastiest. It’s all that academic shit going out to sea. Pound for pound, you can’t beat it.… I know you don’t mean to be tight, Jackson. It’s just your Midwestern toilet training.”

“Yes, we did have them. I expect you’ve found it hard to adjust.”

Phil tensed, coming straight off the refrigerator. Miriam, washing up at the sink, turned quickly drying her hands on her dungarees. “Personally, I think we should eat it for supper. Recycling, Jesus saves. Ecologically sound. Eat shit and cram the empties up your ass.”

“You have a vulgar woman, Philip old buddy,” Jackson drawled, trying to make contact. He had seen Phil tighten also. In their constant sparring, one often pushed the other too far. “Where did you say you found her? Cruising the Square?”

“Wherever I found her, I know how to keep her. And you can jam that up your ass.” Phil stomped into the john and slammed the door. Hunks of the ceiling were heard to fall into the tub. Miriam’s and Jackson’s gazes collided and rebounded. Industriously she scrubbed the mashed potato pot from supper.

When she let out the water, Phil was still sulking in the bathroom and Jackson had quietly laid out the chessboard on the kitchen table. When Phil sauntered out, they were already playing.

“As soon as I’ve finished off this slow-motion general, I’ll come,” she said. They were always playing nowadays.

She thought of it as a kind of heaviness, as if the room tipped or she swelled. It had to do with the way Jackson watched her sometimes. The game was half played. She had two pawns on Jackson, but she had allowed her mind to wander, that wooziness to creep in, and now her bishop had been exchanged for his knight and he was threatening her
rook. The same gaps appeared in his game from time to time. Playing chess was something they had fallen into as a war they could legitimately wage on each other.

Phil she could beat easily because, although he played a cunning game at first, he would forget his own grand strategies in flashes of bravado and wild vendettas. He would launch an attack on her queen and in that pursuit sacrifice four other pieces if only he could effect her capture. Jackson was more nearly her match. If he would have accepted handicapping her a pawn or two, he would have beat her a good percentage of the time. But he did not believe in handicaps, he said, and would not enjoy the game if they did not start out apparently even.

She did not really like to play chess with Phil. But in her uneasy facing of Phil’s roommate, chess was useful. It filled the space between them with mock battle. Phil wanted the pleasure of winning, but he wanted it quickly. If she looked away from the board, sometimes Phil would move the pieces, and then laugh like a kid when she caught him. If he lost his temper he would clean the board with a swipe of his forearm. A couple of times when she patiently got the pieces and set them up as they had been, he was amazed. He no longer remembered.

Playing with Phil was playing, not competing. They had so many games. Sometimes an object would start them off: a flowered, flounced dress she got at the Salvation Army while browsing for surfaces to dye, that they would try on each in turn mincing and posing. A torn and ragged suit of tails in which Phil was a magician failing to produce rabbits from a bottomless hat, in which she was a mad conductor leading the orchestra of Phil. Comb and tissue paper could prompt them to kazoo serenades and outlandish versions of Beethoven that sent Jackson howling to a bar. Even when they were in bed what began as love-making might turn over into teasing or acting out an elaborate seduction, one of the other.

But Jackson truly wanted to win. He deliberated maddeningly. He was a slow player and she was fast and sometimes she would fetch a clock and impose a time limit, or bring a book and ostentatiously read while he was brooding. If she let him wait her into fidgetiness, he sometimes won through lapses on her part. When she faced him across the board, it mattered each time who came out on top. It was ridiculous
that they cared, but they did. She noticed one morning when she brought up the mail and knocked on his door to give him a letter from his parents in Davenport, Iowa, that on the wooden box beside his mattress now lay
My System
by Aron Nimzovich and Griffith and Sergeant’s
Modern Chess Openings.

It was a bare ascetic room, replica of the New York basement cell. His books were still in boxes, his socks and underwear in laundry bag or suitcase. Covered with an army blanket, the aged mattress lay on the floor with his boots beside it. A broken shade hung partway off the window that he seemed to leave open three or four inches now in November just as he had when she had first seen the room, in June. It was a room she entered seldom, and never without knocking and identifying herself and her purpose.

Her feelings remained sore that he was not friendlier. They always seemed rivals for Phil’s attention and respect. Chess was the one thing he would admit wanting to do with her, the one opening he gave her, and that was a poor way to win him over. Obviously he found her presence in the flat an irritant. Phil and she had been used to wandering around naked and it was difficult to remember always to wrap herself in a sheet or put on Phil’s shirt before she trotted to the bathroom or got a beer for Phil or ran into the living room to change a record. Phil did not bother. He marched out as he was regardless of who was sitting in the kitchen. Not defiantly or ostentatiously, just without thinking.

Now Jackson forced her back from that naturalness. He forced her into a false modesty. He dropped remarks and comments and made hard faces. He forced her to become conscious of her body in a bad way, as if it were something he must be protected from, a time bomb in his eye that might explode if left uncovered. He did not treat Phil’s nakedness as aimed at him, a weapon, a taunt, but for her to walk about as she was he regarded as an act of aggression.

One afternoon in December Phil was putting Jackson on about being inhibited. “You can’t touch anybody. Can’t ever give me a pat or hug. It’s like you have a barbed-wire fence around your skin, or one of those force fields from science fiction that nobody can cross. Look at old Miriam. She’s a toucher. Watch her make out sometime with dogs and cats
and kiddies. But you’re scared. All the time she’s around here, you’ve never put a finger on her.”

Miriam laughed. “It’s true, Jackson. Everybody else comes through, they kiss hello, they shake hands, they give a pat or a hug. I’ve never seen you touch another person. I’m not quite sure you touch yourself. Except for scratching!”

“Oh. You want me to touch her.” Jackson looked very tight and mean. “Fine. How about this?” He walked up behind her where she sat at the table and ran his hand slowly and deliberately along her throat and into her shirt to close over her breast. She sat stark still. His hand felt hot and bony and more callused than Phil’s. She did not think she remembered to breathe for several minutes. Jackson was glaring at Phil, who was glaring at Jackson.

She got up abruptly and pushed Jackson out of the way. “I am not a tool with which to beat each other. If you want to touch me, you may not do so in lieu of hitting him. Is that clear?”

“He was provoking me,” Jackson said mildly and sat down at the table with his head in his hands.

“Only because you claim you cannot be provoked.” Miriam went to stand by Phil. “Come, Philip, come. I have to go home soon and do my duty to God and Computer. Cuddle with me and leave Jackson in the solitude he so richly deserves.”

“If you ever do that again, I’ll kick the shit out of you,” Phil said between gritted teeth.

“Are you sure you can?” Jackson still had his head in his hands. “Why should you care? She isn’t faithful to you anyhow.”

“What do you know about what or who I’m faithful to?” Miriam stepped forward, clenching and unclenching her fists. “What do you know about us as a couple? How I care for Phil or how he cares for me?”

“I see him chewed up by jealousy.”

“But you don’t see him suffocating with boredom. There’s a choice. We made it consciously.”

“She’s on target.” Phil stretched himself, suddenly less angry. “You want to fit us in your notions, put the strait jacket on whether it fits or not.” He put an arm around Miriam. “I’m not going to fuck one woman for thirty years, or pretend that’s what it’s all about. Don’t you understand
I found her and I taught her? I opened her into the woman she is, the woman that suits me.”

When Phil spoke about her as if she were a clay doll he had found lumpish in Brooklyn and molded into a woman, she felt uncomfortable. But after all he had been her teacher. He could open her up to what was on her mind as nobody else ever could. Besides, he liked to sound off in an exaggerated way, and especially he liked to boast in front of Jackson.

“Maybe. And is that what she wants?”

“Jackson, you grew up among WASP ladies who are all raped virgins at heart, and you just can’t believe in a woman with juice.”

“A fool and his honey are soon parted.” Jackson leaned back in the kitchen chair, scratching his shoulder.

As they lay face to face in Phil’s bed she asked, “What was that all about?”

“Oh, he gets the itch around here—the two of us going at it like jack rabbits day and night.” Phil was grinning, golden and wicked and proud of himself. “He just needs some pussy. He always gets very moral when he’s horny.”

Her body still prickled, her pride was sore. So coldly deliberate. Or was he attracted to her? She felt he was always punishing her for being alive. “He doesn’t like me. Thinks I’m no good for you.”

“Aw, he’s a bit jealous. We’ve been friends a long, long time, pigeon. I was a punk kid, and I wouldn’t have come through Nam alive except for him. We been through a whole lot of different scenes. Lots of women have come and women have gone. Like Sissy, his wife. She never could stand me, though I’ll say she was a good-looking piece, and one time he accused me of being after her, one time when he was drunk. It’s the fact that I can talk to you, that’s the rub. He thinks I take you too seriously, that’s what he says.”

“Too seriously! Am I some kind of joke?”

“He thinks you take yourself too seriously.”

“That’s just what men say about women who don’t
giggle
and play dumb. He’s always setting himself up as some kind of judge! How will I support you in your old age if I don’t have a profession! … But I don’t understand the two of you together. The way you poke at each other.”

“That’s just fooling around. What do you want us to do,
kiss each other? He’s my old buddy, old Jackson. We both know where the other one’s at.”

“Do you?” She put her finger on his lean aquiline nose and pressed gently. “I’m not convinced.”

“It’s beyond you, girl.” He brought his mouth down to her breast.

Saturday night between Christmas and New Year’s she sat facing Jackson at the kitchen table over a chess game while Phil was tending bar. He would come home after work. In the meantime she had taken the first game with style: for once Jackson had conceded long before the end game. Sometimes he was stubborn, but as he read his chess books, less often he insisted on prolonging a game whose outcome was clearly charted.

“Come on, two out of three.” Jackson began to set up the pieces again. “We’ll have time for another game before he gets home. If he can find his way. Some nights he swallows as much as he sells.”

“Okay, two out of two.”

She hoped that Phil would not drink too much. She wanted badly to unwind with him. She had worked hard all week, debugging a program on the computer. The night before, something gratuitously nasty had happened. She had run into Barnett from her course in compiler generator systems and he had asked her how she had done. At her answer he had given her a mean squinty smirk and said, “Maybe if I had tits to shake in his face I’d ace it too.” He had walked off leaving her feeling daubed with vomit. As if she hadn’t been eating and sleeping and breathing that course.