Vida (15 page)

“My mama. I always called her Ruby. My father—my own father, I mean—didn’t like it, but ‘After all, that’s my name’ she’d say. Ruby Rose Lyubkov Whippletree, and then Asch. She should have stopped with the Ruby Rose.”

“Was your old man Jewish or not?”

She sliced the tomatoes in silence, deciding whether she wanted to open that up or not. The trading of intimacy, was it worth the bother? Traveling, she tried not to invent excessively. Her own stories had sunk deeper and deeper into her.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

She shrugged. “For a long time I haven’t … It seems fruitless.”

“Think I’m too young to understand? Try me”

”I guess I’m not sure what’s happening,” she said baldly.

“Who do you love?’’

“Who?” She felt almost afraid to answer. “Natalie, Ruby, Leigh. Paul— that’s my brother. My friend Eva”

“You’re loving people in the past. But we’re stuck here. We’re not even real to them. All you really want to do is crawl back into your own past. That’s why you think I don’t count. ‘Cause I wasn’t around then, back when you think it was all really real.”

They lay in bed. He kept his back to her. Putting her arms around him, she tried to thaw him into forgiveness. “Joel, you’re right. I agree. I’m trying to hold on to the past, because the present isn’t feeding me and I’m scared.”

“I’m small potatoes compared to Leigh and Natalie and Kevin. All the big guns.”

“That’s not true” She cuddled her face into his neck, pressed her breasts into his back curving away from her. “I’m scared, is all.”

“What are
you
scared of?”

“You.”

“How come me? A little shit like me.”

“Joel, why do you hate yourself so? I know I could love you” Why had she said that, why?

For a long time he did not answer, until long after she had let go of him and lay on her back staring at the ceiling. Finally he said, “But you don’t want to?”

“Do you want me to?”

“You couldn’t.”

“How can we argue about whether or not I could love you? Joel! I like being with you.”

He flipped to face her, the atmosphere at once lightening. She had the feeling he was smiling in the dark. As if idly, he began to play with her breasts. “You like to fuck, don’t you?”

“Don’t say it as if you were observing I like to kick old ladies down the stairs.”

“Is it the same with any guy?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Some women get off on strangers, let go best with somebody they don’t feel intimate with—”

“That’s what you’re like?”

“No! I have the most response with somebody I feel close to.”

“But you came with me.”

”Maybe because we’re both fugitives. And you were very gentle.”

He was moving his finger around and around her clitoris. Then he slid two fingers deep into her.

“You’re juicy already. Want to?”

“I don’t even know if you’re excited”

He laid his prick against her. “I’m excited.”

When they were resting entwined and sloppy with semen and sweat cozy with pleasure, she realized that the sex had been marvelous. Suddenly they had moved to another level. She had not been conscious of his experimenting on her, and he did not remain rigidly in control. She had come and come for what felt like minutes.

“Maybe because it’s all getting better and better it scares me. It’s moving fast,” she whispered.

“Who knows how much time we got?”

“Before you have to go someplace else?”

“There’s no place I have to go. Depends on you. And on how much time before they make a special out of us and burn us on the evening news like Jimmy and Belinda.”

“It’s better for you too, now?”

He laughed. “Terrific. Coming back to life. It’s like my body’s been numb.”

“From what?” She was dying to ask him about Kiley.

“You won’t even tell me about your mother.”

“Yes, I will.”

He chuckled. “After a good fuck, you’d tell me anything”

“Don’t say that! It alarms me.”

“Kiley didn’t like sex. She liked being wanted, because that’s power. At first I thought she enjoyed it with me. I’d swear she came. But after a few months, she wouldn’t even let me eat her. It was like maybe once a month I could make her come with my hand and I could rub myself against her ass. That was our sex life.”

“Didn’t you mind?”

“I went crazy. Maybe she did love me at first, but I think she didn’t for a long time. I wouldn’t give up and let go.”

“If she didn’t love you, why didn’t she break it off?”

“I guess it was convenient” He grimaced. “Kiley’s a lonely person. Maybe she even got off some on making me suffer”

I can’t latch on to him because he’s a good lover, she thought; we can’t live in bed. But that was her forebrain issuing memoranda from the dean’s office that all the workers—the feelings, the muscles, the gut—were about to throw in the garbage.

“Laura told me the wife taught school and he’s a carpenter. So eleven ought to be safe,” Vida said as they walked around the pond. They passed boarded-up houses, houses empty for the winter; but when they came to the edge of the woods near the Kensington house, a white colonial of two stories with an attached garage, the pleasure fled and they huddled behind a high blueberry bush. The Kensington house was built directly on the road that led out to Route 6, but they had approached on the path that went round the pond for privacy. Now they had reached the far border of security. “I’ll go alone” she said. “She’ll be less alarmed if she’s there”

“Suppose he’s goofing off work? I’ll go”

“The car’s gone.” They could look through the garage window and see the doors open. A small motorboat was up on sawhorses. A kid’s bike lay on its side in the grass. They strained for sounds from the house. Vida felt like a child. Sometimes she felt as if becoming a fugitive had reduced her to permanent childhood, to playing continuous hide-and-seek. When she and Natalie were thirteen, this was the sort of game they had played: pretending the adults were cops, the enemy, Them; sneaking around pretending danger. Even after so many years of pursuit she had trouble believing in this game: that now a slip would cost her her freedom and perhaps her life. They could not skulk all day staring at the blank windows of the white house. “I’ll go. A woman is less scary.”

She marched resolutely out of the orange-and-brown woods across the damp lawn to the door. A red ball covered with blue stars lay in the path. Then she saw movement at a window, and it was all she could do to force a smile and keep marching. Somebody at the curtains.

No, a white cat was rubbing against the window as she came up. Pet me. A long-haired white cat with blue eyes rubbed its forehead against the glass. “Hello, pretty,” Vida whispered. She opened the screen door and stuck a note where it would be obvious: a note thanking the Kensingtons for the food and saying they were Laura’s tenants. They were leaving soon and did not know when she planned to come out. Joel had invented the tenants’ story, saying if they claimed to be Laura’s relatives, Wendy might still be interested, but nobody would care about somebody renting a place for two weeks. They’d only be sorry they’d wasted their vegetables.

She hastened to him across the lawn, and impatiently he stepped out to meet her. “Nobody there but a pussycat.”

”That ought to hold them.” He took her hand and they strolled back. “Tonight the summer people who still come out weekends start arriving. We better keep close to home and lay low till Monday.”

“Let’s leave our lights out and just have a fire. We don’t want anybody else dropping in.”

Dragging the mattress from the bedroom, they slept near the wood stove. That night two more houses showed lights. In the morning they chopped wood. Then she tried to work on her paper, gave it up and read the pamphlets Joel had been underlining. Then they took a cautious walk, made supper. Every day they made love twice. Vida, who had not had much sex in years, felt overwhelmed. More and more she had lived in her head and her nerves and less and less down in the rich body with its bird and frog songs, its yammering complaints and its overweening thunderous urges. The descent into the flesh startled her. She had thought of herself as grown past the violent onslaughts of desire. Now she felt as if she was in heat, as if wanting him was a constant whether she was momentarily aware of the response or not, that wanting him was a condition lurking in her that need only be triggered to surface. In fact she studied the pamphlets, making notes to prove to herself she was still politically motivated; if she could concentrate on an argument, she was not altogether lost.

Finally the city people left and Monday came. “When Jimmy was resenting me he said I’m always in a relationship with a woman.” Joel walked the woods road toward town, kicking a small rock before him, chin jabbed into his chest. “That I run from one to another like a rabbit streaking for a hole. If not one hole, then another”

Now he’s issuing warnings. Have we moved too fast? She kept her back very straight, pacing along. “I haven’t fallen in love with somebody in years.”

“But you’re still in love with this Leigh?”

“But I’ve loved him for fourteen years … For a year and a half after Kevin, I didn’t sleep with anybody.”

“How come? That’s a long time to sleep alone … I’ve never gone that long, even when I was really on the run. I mean, I’d pick up
somebody
… then I’d get involved.”

“I felt like Natalie was right, there was something cuckoo in how I acted with men. I had to live without a core relationship with a man. I had to be alone in my … my innards, my soul.”

“You seem like a real strong woman. I can’t see why you had to cut yourself off like that, just to prove something to your sister. She’s married, right? Who’s she to tell you that you got to hang by yourself?”

“It wasn’t proving it to her. It’s just when she talked about women’s issues in New York, I was a pure Marxist-Leninist and I shut her up. Then when I started knowing things wrong in my own life, I felt she’d seen a lot I’d missed.”

He shrugged heavily. His bones seemed to enlarge in his face and forehead. “Maybe she’s right. That’s what I ought to do—be a hermit. Maybe Jimmy was right.”

Three pay phones stood in a row outside the pharmacy. Joel loitered, pretending to skim notices on a weathered board. Cake sale for the volunteer fire department. Yoga lessons. A ‘73 VW station wagon with snow tires. At five to 10 she set herself up, coins arranged in rows, phone code turned back to digits, cold hands grasping the phone. The street was mostly empty, cars clustered around the open coffee shop. People walked with collars turned up against the drizzle. The measure of how far she had come with Joel was that she no longer knew whether she wanted Natalie to tell her to come to Long Island or to caution her to hold for a week. She wanted to see Natalie, but she also wanted more time with Joel. The intimacy they were weaving could be cut off. She felt guilty at how intensely she wanted another week alone with him. By next Tuesday at the latest they must leave anyhow, as Laura permitted no one to stay longer than two weeks.

Ten. Time to dial. It rang. “Hello?”

“Natalie!” She should not have burst out, but she knew she hadn’t mistaken that wry throaty voice. “Hi, love. How are ya?”

“It’s cool for you now? To talk?”

“For the moment. Now listen quick. Are you nearby?”

“No. North.”

“All the way north?”

“No. I can get there by tonight.”

“Hmmm. Got a better idea. This weekend there’s a conference in Boston—women’s health. I wasn’t going. These days I’m working exclusively on battered women. But we got an invite, why not? So I’ll take the shuttle up Friday night, drop by the conference next morning—it’s at B.U.—and then clear out. Where can we meet?”

“I don’t know Boston well.
Not
Cambridge.”

Natalie pondered. “I don’t know Boston awfully well myself … Listen, there’s a department store there. Filene’s, downtown. Let’s pick something. Like lingerie. There can’t be more than one lingerie department in Filene’s. I’ll meet you there 12 on Saturday. How’s that?”

“Okay” Downtown areas jammed with people were not her favorite stomping grounds. Saturday noon in shoppers’ paradise sounded like a mob scene, and she had no idea how she would get to Boston. All that was minor compared with the lack of any other place to suggest.

Joel and she decided they might as well shop in town. Then she splurged on a bottle of zinfandel. By the time they had hiked all the way back to the house, it was afternoon and they were exhausted. He opened a can of sardines, she fried some of the green tomatoes lined up on every sill and they ate greedily. Then they stumbled into the other bedroom. In the middle of the day they did not dare lie down in the living room, in plain sight through the expanse of glass to any visitor.

The rain crept over the house, streaking the windows. In the center of the bed they huddled. She slept curled against him. He always seemed beautiful to her: beautiful as he nuzzled into sleep; beautiful as he slept snoring softly; beautiful as he woke and opened his eyes, dark as the wet bark of the pines.