Small Changes (29 page)

She would cry out in bed, “I love you!” He would hold her to him. But something in him would clench against her. He would not speak. She could feel that locking in him, that stubbornness.

“It’s because that woman hurt you, the woman you married. You’re punishing me for her.”

“A fool sticks his hand on the chopping block once to feel
if the knife will really lop off a finger. Only a complete idiot does it twice.”

“I’m not a knife! I’m not a chopping block!”

“I’m not a complete idiot.”

She sensed in him a huge will to failure having run its course. She could not trace the history of it, but the janitor’s job and the cold sexual trade-off with the woman in 4B had been a bottom, and he was ready now to want to do something in the world. He would not admit to wanting much. It was she who had to send for his old transcripts and write letters to graduate schools and get his file of letters of recommendation together. Yet the activity was not her idea. She was responding to quiet pressure from him. He wanted to be made to do something. He felt it was appropriate for her to want him to return to school.

Maybe it was just as well she couldn’t see Phil. She feared she would have nothing to give him. She seemed to have nothing left over. What did they do? They made love. They ate meals. They quarreled. They walked together. In pauses in the long icy winter, in the occasional thaws of February, on frigid clear nights in March, they walked. He liked especially to walk in the evenings past the lighted houses on the hilly tree-lined streets of Cambridge and Somerville. “So many little lives,” he drawled. “Look in and try them on for size. Window-shopping. Would that life fit you, those apple-cheeked kids, that TV set, that lamp with its tutu in the window? That book-lined study and 1917 posters and the oak table? That black light and the strobe and the purple walls and mobile of the solar system going round under the huge speakers?”

“Who’d walk into anybody’s life? Like sticking your feet in somebody’s old boots. Too loose in the places you curve in and too tight in the places you stick out.”

“You think people’s lives fit them? Maybe they all feel that way. Silent screams going up like smoke, Get me out of here!”

They listened to music a lot, mildly stoned. Often he would cook them a good meal and then they would sit about replete, listening to records. See, she would tell herself, it is an equal relationship, for he does the cooking. But she knew she lied. He had too much heavy will for controlling her.

One Friday evening she was to spend with him, when she
arrived and let herself in, he was not there. She waited. She waited two hours, while anxiety and resentment wound her tighter and tighter. She tried to fight her tension. After all, how many times had she waited for Phil, casually relaxed, knowing he would come or he wouldn’t and never attaching that much importance to one time in an open series? Why couldn’t she achieve that grace with Jackson, that looseness? Why must she sit like—like a woman was supposed to, stewing? Her anxiety stripped away her sense of herself as a strong person moving through things in her own style. She became grasping woman. She became dependent woman. She became scared woman. This waiting had teeth.

When she heard him on the stairs, a great relief loosened her. Now to find the strength to suppress what she had felt. She came to meet him, reaching up to kiss. He tasted of whiskey.

“You’ve been drinking it up.” Keep the voice light.

“Dropped by Finnegan’s Wake, got to talking.”

“Finnegan’s Wake. Isn’t that where Phil works?”

“Yeah, he was on duty. Being as it’s early, he wasn’t that busy yet.”

She searched his face. “I’m glad you saw him. It’s bad, never seeing each other, never talking, never knowing how he is.”

“Old Phil? He’s fine.” Jackson set his jaw, put a record on loud on the phonograph, got out his hash pipe. Every line of his body told her what they had said was none of her business.

“Did you talk about me?”

“No.” His gaze asked her scornfully why they would. “Is he really all right?”

Jackson did not answer.

She began to shout. “You’re just going to sit there, right? Closed off. No communication, no warmth, no contact. I can sit and twiddle my thumbs and freeze to death.”

“You might try listening to the Mozart. It’s a new recording of that horn concerto,” he drawled.

“Go fuck yourself!” She bounced up. “If you’re going to pretend I’m not here, I’ll save you the trouble. Good night!” She felt like a fool. Going for her jacket, putting it on, making the motions of leaving, she kept waiting for him to stop her, to protest, to save their time together. But his stubborn
silence held. He sat and sucked on the pipe, presumably engrossed in the music. She slammed out.

At home she could do nothing but brood and weep. Perhaps she had been unreasonable. Perhaps he had had little conversation with Phil beyond How are you doing, okay, keep on trucking. Perhaps he had really wanted to listen to the record. Perhaps he had been depressed and, instead of trying to reach him, she had attacked. Perhaps he did blame her for his estrangement from Phil. She had hurt only herself storming out. But she had to draw the line someplace in what she would endure. She felt wrong on the left and on the right, no matter what she did or didn’t.

She kept getting glimpses of the man who had wanted her so much, of the man who could love her. Was it Jackson she saw then or only a trick of the light falling at the right angle on what her wishes projected? Sometimes he would open to her. He would push aside his fear that she would get too close to him, gobble him, possess him, to reach out and meet her suddenly.

One mild night in April she took him to a party someone in her department was giving in Watertown, a married student and his wife who worked as a nurse, on the ground floor of a late Victorian house. Uniquely among such parties it turned out to be the kind she enjoyed, with lots of dancing as well as the inevitable shop talk by the men and house talk by the women. Jackson never danced but he found some men to talk to. After she had danced for an hour she felt good through her body and was ready to leave with him, both of them pleased till they got outside and found it was pouring rain. The wind was blowing from the east, smelling of fish and bringing torrents. Her apartment was closer and they decided to spend the night for a change. He seemed to like the idea.

“You sure were busy with those vats of colored water,” he remarked, but he still seemed relaxed. He sat on her bed, back to the wall and one leg flexed, rolling a joint. For once the memory of her intimacy with Phil did not jog him into withdrawal. He held her ankle with one hand and the joint with the other and sucked smoke and sighed and relaxed.

“My father grew up in a house like the one tonight. He thought it a horror. He couldn’t wait to live in an up-to-date house. He’s always building another one. The one they’re
in now, the guy who threw it up, he’s into a Machine for Living rhetoric. It’s big as a shopping plaza and just as garish. All angles and glass walls that birds kill themselves on. Nothing works. The doors don’t shut, where there are any. The fireplace fills the living room with smoke. You can hear any noise. The plumbing kicks like a mule. I’d live in a trailer before that.”

“Did you grow up in that kind of house?”

“Smaller scale. We lived out in a fancy suburb. The thing that used to impress the other kiddies was that we had our own tennis courts. I broke my wrist out there once. Fell on it. I don’t fall well—I never have.”

“Want me to attach metaphorical meaning to that?”

He grinned. “As you wish. I’ve seen Phil fall down a flight of stairs and get up and walk off. If I did that, I’d break my back.” He heard himself speaking Phil’s name and stiffened, his eyes going up to the softly patterned canopy over the light bulb. “Arabian nights fantasy, the two of you. He wouldn’t chop off your head and throw you out with the other chicks because you kept bringing stories home.”

“Do you really want to talk about Phil and me, or do you want to toss out one of those barbed remarks and go back inside?”

“Toss a remark and run. No.” He let go of her ankle and pulled her down to him. “Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars or two hundred sorrows. Just go directly to bed.”

“What were you like as a child?” His sad-eyed face was framed in her hands like a permanent question.

“A snot. I was one of those awful children who beat up others who don’t admire their daddies enough.”

“Don’t you want me to know you? You hoard your past You feed me one dry dog biscuit at a time.”

“No. I want you to love me.”

“Do you? But you don’t want to love me.”

“Miriam, Miriam, I do. But freely. Not under compulsion.”

“Who’s compulsing you?”

“You are. When you ask me to do what I do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What do you think I’m doing but loving you?” He
gathered her against him. “Come on, take off this frippery stuff.”

She wished she could ask him what made this sex loving and other sex cold to him, but she did not want to destroy the closeness and therefore kept quiet.

Afterward she sat cross-legged, still naked, and took his wallet from the pants lying over the foot of the bed. Reading his driver’s license: “Douglas M. Jackson. Why can’t I call you Doug?”

“That stands for Douglas MacArthur Jackson. Can you imagine going through the reserves and into the Army with a name like that? Christ, how did I survive? I loathe and detest that name more than you can conceive. My old man’s hero. Not that he served under him—you can bet your boots on that. Essential war industries, getting rich on the home front. He almost sent me to military school.”

“If you had a child, what would you name him or her?”

“I have a child.” His face stiffened.

“Jackson, Jackson, I forgot. I forgot for just a moment.”

“I never forget.”

“Why can’t you ever see him? What is it?”

The words were chunks of iron dropping from his mouth. “Her name was Cecily but I used to call her Sissy. She wanted what I seemed to be. What I thought I was. What I was trained to be. She had her sights on me and I went along. She wanted a ring, I got her a ring. She wanted a wedding, I got her a wedding. She wanted a house, I got her a house. She was a good-looking woman, a thoroughbred from a family that regularly coughed up college presidents and bank managers and even a senator. They all live to be ninety and stand six feet tall and are always right because they laid down the rules. Then I stopped producing, so she got a divorce.” He laughed dryly. “I knew she’d been with another man but I couldn’t prove it. She took me to the cleaners. The judge practically wept for her, married to such a degenerate drug addict bum. He was probably her uncle. Then she pulled the real sly one. She agreed to a cash settlement, no alimony. That was supposed to be a great gesture, I wasn’t going to be pinned to the wall for thirty years. Then she married the lawyer.”

“The lawyer who got the divorce?”

“I had another lawyer on paper, but I wasn’t contesting
it. It was supposed to be such a generous deal. He wasn’t a divorce lawyer, he was the family lawyer doing the divorce as a special favor. Then she married him. Haha. Chuck Magnusson. I try to get anywhere near Jerry and they can put me in the can. We don’t fight in the same class, Magnusson and I.”

“Did she hate you? Is that why?”

“She pretended to be scared of me. We had some ugly scenes. The only way I could shut her up was physical. And I suppose she was really scared about how I’d changed. Any change scares people like that. She kept saying she couldn’t talk to me any more. I didn’t notice her trying to listen.”

“Had they set you up from the beginning? Was she involved with him before?”

“I’ll never really know, will I? I was pretty sure I knew who she’d been seeing—a real estate developer. But Magnusson was a way superior catch. He’d been divorced himself three years before—very different scene. Visitation rights, friendly going back and forth, no scandal, no menace, everybody polite. I understand they all get together for barbecues and other social occasions, all the half brothers and half sisters and half-wits and half-truths and bitter halves.” He sat tight, his arm wooden under her touch.

“Jackson, you know I am not Cecily. Do you really in any part of your mind think we’re the same?”

He looked at her. Then he said in a gentle voice, “You’re both cunts.”

She tried to abate her anger. “You and I both have livers, large and small intestines, kidneys, spines, blood vessels, nerves, spleens, stomachs, hearts and, I had thought, brains in common. What conclusions do you draw from anatomy? That I am about to take you to the cleaners? Wow, Jackson, I might as well develop the paranoid fantasy that you want me to keep you.” She brushed the hair from her eyes, “After all, in a couple of years I’ll be able to. What on earth do you think I want from you, that you’re so concerned to hang onto?”

“Possession.”

“What are you talking about? The first thing you wanted after we went to bed was to separate me from Phil.”

“Now you’re jealous when you know I’ve seen him.”

“You’re damned straight I am. Why should you have the
privilege and I be denied it? I miss seeing him!”

“I’m sure you do,” he said flatly.

“What a drag you are! You think you invented friendliness.”

“You think you’re not always pushing at me? Why do you think we struggle so much? You’re always trying to shove me around.”

“If you don’t want to be open with me, what do you want with me? I’m in love with you and I’m starving to death.”

“That’s what it is: I don’t want to be eaten.”

She shook her head. “I fell into that. Right into your hands.”

“What better place? All this talking, it creates flak. When you shut your mouth and open your legs, we do much better.”

She ran into Phil in a bookstore off Harvard Square. A feeling of being watched made her raise her head from the table of remaindered books she was leafing through and turn slowly. Phil was standing by the poetry books still holding whatever he had been reading and looking at her, his intense stare crossing the store. She immediately dropped her gaze. Stifling hot in her red poncho. The first time in the museum courtyard, that gaze asking her questions. Now more pain, more anger, but still questions. She could not turn away. She met his gaze again and felt her lips part as if she could say something across the distance. She could not move. She stood transfixed, the glossy book of Indian sculpture growing heavy in her sweating hands.