Vida (17 page)

“Well, he did go to prison for robbery.” She rolled over on her stomach, feeling that Leigh was merely pretending not to understand.

“‘When the gates of the prison are opened, the real dragon will fly out’” Leigh quoted Ho Chi Minh. “Aren’t you being a mite bourgeois?”

“Why does Lohania like them so mean?”

“She likes me, and I’m sweet as a chocolate éclair—or so my ladies tell me.” He tugged at her hair. “My strawberry blond. What makes you think he’s mean?”

“He looks mean” she said stubbornly. “He marches into the kitchen like he owns it and pulls out half the refrigerator. Then he helps himself and leaves it for me to clean up.”

“Kevin’s a real radical, down to his toes,” Leigh said, taking the male side at once. “Good instinctive hatred of capitalism. He knows where and how he’s been oppressed.”

“And he plans to oppress Lohania and me as much as he can.”

“You don’t like real working-class men, you know that? Only intellectuals like me. You think every real working-class man is your father. Tom What’s-his-face. Takes an intellectual to make your juices run.”

“You never met Tom,” she said defensively. She knew better. The reason she felt attracted to Kevin in spite of disliking him was that he did remind her of her father. Her father Tom. Not her father Sandy. Kevin’s anger had a similar trim to it. “My old man had a pretty good line on class. Didn’t prevent him from being a pig at home. He wasn’t even particularly racist. He liked Japanese women from when he was in the Occupation. Said they knew how to please a man. He said that to Ruby a lot …”

Blue filled the morning windows. Their apartment was on the fifteenth floor of an old rent-controlled building that ran half a block along West End and around the corner on 103rd Street. For a Manhattan apartment it danced in light, the high-rise across the street not being tall enough to cut off the sun, while east along the block they overlooked a row of brownstones.

Naked as she slept, she got up, reflecting what to put on to go to the kitchen. Lohania lived with them part time—she commuted from New Jersey, where she had a room in a big Movement house—and she had probably come back here from the party last night. A couple from North Carolina, members of the SAW chapter at Chapel Hill, had been sleeping on their living-room floor all week. Therefore, she put on her slinky tangerine Empire-waisted slit-to-the-thigh nightgown, but put over it her plain-Jane green corduroy duster.

In the living room, the North Carolina couple were fucking in a sleeping bag as she pretended not to notice, going by in the hall on her way to the dark central kitchen, least pleasant room, to light the gas and then pour the milk to measure in the ceramic mugs an earlier potter girlfriend of Leigh’s had made. His lovers always gave him presents, she reflected, gazing at the closed door of Lohania’s room. Lohania had the room off the kitchen that had been a maid’s room, the subject of endless not amusing jokes from other people about their domestic arrangements.

She listened carefully, hoping Lohania was there but that Kevin had gone back to Hoboken. She wanted Lohania to herself today. They had to sit down with Natalie and plan a strategy together for the meeting of the Steering Committee. Carefully she spooned sugar, a dash of cinnamon, a hit of cream into each mug, ground the French Roast from Zabar’s, brought water to the boil while keeping an eye on the milk healing. Then she cut off the stale edge from the dark Russian bread and set the slices on a blue dish on a wooden tray they had found in a Maryland junk shop on the way back from a civil rights demo—decorated with blue-and-yellow flowers that looked like eyes. After she had added a hunk of sweet butter, she ladled out bitter orange marmalade. Apricot nectar this morning. Lohania always bought flowers. In the room beyond, the sunny dining room, with light glittering on the parquet floors they had refinished, Lohania had put bronze chrysanthemums in a vase on the mahogany table Leigh had inherited from his Aunt Fanny. Vida slipped in quietly not to disturb the couple in the living room, separated by glass doors they had shut for privacy, and stole one chrysanthemum for her tray. There. Ready for Leigh.

As she set the tray down on the stool beside the bed and flung off the wrapper, she gloated over the Cretan embroidery that formed the headboard of her fine big bed and the embroidered hairy chest of her own sweet lover with his pointed curly beard of glossy bay brown pointing straight up as he yawned. She did not mind getting up and waiting on him, for she tended to think of men as frail. They could only do it sometimes. Once a day was pretty good to get out of one of them. She wanted Leigh as she sidled into bed beside him, plumping pillows, and handed him his mug.

He had switched on the bedside radio to a rock station. The Grateful Dead singing over their café au lait. “You know what I really want to do, babes? The hell with this commentator crap. I want to be a New Left disc jockey. Leaping Leigh, the first of the Red Hot Papas. That’s how to reach the kids. Play the beat, and in between you can chatter and comment and really lay out some hot licks on where the country’s at. That’s my true fantasy”‘

She smiled at him. “And adored by seventy-two thousand teenybop-pers, sure.”

“Nah, I just want all the freebies on the new releases. And to interview all those guys … But I always wanted to be a disc jockey. I was the jockey for the dances in high school, you know that? Except for the big ones where we had five jerks in to play”‘

Breakfast over, she removed the tray and leaned to kiss his mouth, tasting of coffee and marmalade. The sun fired all the hair tangled on his arms and chest. “My bear,” she lilted. “My brown bear, my cinnamon bear.” His prick was already standing, making a funny tent of the sheet. She slid under.

“Leave the gown on this time,” he said. “It’s exciting. Slithery.”

Leigh never liked to dally long in caressing. He claimed to be insensitive except for his prick. Sometimes she wondered if so much hair dulled the nerves. Mopsy, lying in the blue easy chair beating her tail in hope she would soon be taken out, was more sensitive to touch than Leigh was. He would go down on her to get her ready. Then she would have to decide whether he was up for a long one or a short one. If it was going to be quick, she fantasized to come; if he was going to take his time, she just enjoyed it and stayed with him. The only problem was trying to guess early enough to gauge herself. Once he was inside her, he liked making love. He was vigorous and responsive.

“Where did you get that nightie?” He dangled it off his hand as he sat watching her dress.

“Natalie got it for me.”

“Your sister. Ha. I thought it was some hot young lover.”

“You’re the one gets presents. Ever noticed, in our neck of the woods it’s the women who give the men presents?”

“‘Cause we’re all so wonderful.”

“Especially you. Right?”

“Right … Besides, you have more time to shop.”

“Wow! Are you living in an illusion. We have time? Natalie? Me? Sure, from two to four in the mornings on alternate Mondays. Well, for that you can just walk Mopsy this morning.”

He strolled back to his own room whistling a Beatles song, and Mopsy followed him, wagging her tail harder, as if she had understood. Vida sat at her vanity, brushing the snarls from her silky red hair. Time, huh? If anyone in New York had a busier schedule, she had yet to meet them: perhaps Mayor Lindsay, but she doubted it.

Dressed, she ran out the service door, down three flights and into the wing of the building on West End. She rapped on Natalie’s door, gave the back buzzer a Dah dah dah DAH, waited impatiently. Natalie answered the door in her old red bathrobe. It had been a good cashmere bathrobe when they had gone away to college together. She rumpled Natalie’s curly brown hair, kissed her rosy mouth and hugged her, plump cuddly zaftig Natalie. “Get rid of that damn old bathrobe, Nattikins. Off with it. It’s practically dragging on the ground, and it looks like somebody’s mother ought to be wearing it.”

Natalie wrinkled her snub nose at Vida. “Fuck you. I am somebody’s mother. And that ain’t all. Come in.”

“Daniel still in bed?”

“No, he went out to get the
Times
and he’s not back. But he took Sam in his stroller, so blessed be. Let’s sit in peace. Want some coffee?”

”Sure. Black.”

“Me too.”

“How come, Natty?”

Natalie patted her belly. “I’m on a diet”

“I like you the way you are. You don’t look fat to me.”

“Gee, thanks. But I’m going to be a lot bigger soon.”

“Oh, no.” Vida could not pretend to be delighted quickly enough. “Not again.”

“Yeah” Natalie shrugged, rubbing her belly. At different times Natalie looked to her like a Buddha, like an implacable peasant, like a beaming child. “Another one.”

“Don’t you use the diaphragm?”

“Yeah. I use it … But Daniel gets pissed sometimes, when I get up to put it in. He liked the pill. Only it made me swell up like a dyspeptic whale. Belching, farting, all the time fireworks … He says if I don’t put it in first, if I have to get up, he doesn’t feel in the mood by the time I get back.”

“You going to have it? You don’t have to.”

“What’s the use being married if you still get abortions? I ask you” Natalie blew on her coffee. “Everybody says that only kids are neurotic. The folks will be glad.”

“So when is it due?”

“Don’t call a baby
it.
Like you’re expecting a monster. Let’s see, middle of May. At least I won’t stagger through the summer like a one-woman slum the way I did last time, remember? … Had your breakfast?”

“With Leigh. Nice this morning. Lohania’s home, but I don’t know if that new dude of hers is squatting on her today”“

“Surly, isn’t he? We need to confer.” Natalie sat up straighter, spooning plain yogurt into her bowl. “I want the leaflets to offer some political content this time. Not just, Wow, let’s all go dance in the streets and stop traffic”

“Well, it’s got to be today. Tomorrow Lohania will be back in Newark and I’ll be at work … Which reminds me, you and I have to knock out the monthly budget. We ran over on food again.”

“Why don’t you ask Kyriaki for a raise?”

“Not a chance, Natty … I wish that couple camping on our floor would kick in something for food.”

“They figure we’re too bourgeois to care. Between our two households we probably hold more real jobs than the rest of the New York Movement put together.”

Natalie spoke cheerfully, although Vida knew her sister had disliked quitting her job at Brooklyn College, where she had been intensely interested in her students and had served as faculty sponsor for the SAW chapter. Natalie had been enthusiastic about having a baby, but would have liked to go on teaching too. Sam would soon be old enough for day-care, and she had been looking forward to teaching at least part time. “Maybe you could get a job at the free school,” Vida said, knowing her sister would have followed her thoughts.

“I like to work in mainstream institutions—that’s my bias. Counter-institutions aren’t for me. I don’t like the prima donna men who hang out down there … I want to reach students who have to get the degrees, not the ones who can play around.”

She squeezed Natalie’s hand, feeling the unyielding wedding ring. It said, I belong to Daniel, who has just stuck another baby in me. Sam was nice and cute, almost as cute as Mopsy, although a lot more work, and now that he was talking, amazingly bright, but who needed another? She wanted more of Natalie’s time, not less. “Did you tell Ruby and Sandy yet?”

“I’ll call tonight. You want to make it a group call? Get on the extension?”

“Sure. It’s easier that way. Excuses us for not writing, and the confusion speeds it along.” She loved her parents, but they were upset by their daughters’ political activities. A photograph of Vida in
Life
after the last SAW national convention had frightened them. She was making a speech outdoors, holding up her fist in front of an NLF flag, looking fierce. Actually, she had been making a report from the first women’s caucus in SAW about the lack of day-care facilities. She had been angry, all right, because the men had been chatting and ignoring her report. Not that Vida cared much about day-care facilities except as the lack of them impacted on Natalie, but she had been chosen to make the report as the loudest of the women, the best speaker, the one with the most charisma on the platform. Yet the moment the men heard “women’s caucus” and “kids” they tuned out and started milling around.

“Natty, you got time to do the laundry this week?”

Natalie sighed. “I guess so … I still haven’t found anybody from the sitting pool to cover for me Tuesday night.”

“You’ve got to, Natalie. You can’t miss another Steering Committee!”

“Maybe I can get Daniel to stay with Sam,” Natalie said without much hope. “If he doesn’t have a meeting for once”

“Maybe we can actually hire a baby-sitter. Put up a notice in the elevator”

“Some teenybopper I don’t know? Don’t be ridiculous!” Natalie drew her little self up, sternly maternal.

”Okay, I’ll find somebody” One of the kids in SAW who had a crush on her. “Don’t worry.”

“Not some jerk whose idea of fun is feeding babies acid, okay?”

Oscar and Pelican Bob, who were setting up the SAW exhibit in the park, stopped by at noon to pick up the work for the War Pavilion. At two the family set off for the Smash-the-State Fair, Natalie pushing the stroller. Her corduroy jumper came about two inches above her knees. Natalie did not wear her skirts as short as Lohania and Vida did, who were always con-spiratorially shortening together, another inch, another, egging each other on. Daniel and Leigh walked in advance, with Mopsy trotting between them proudly, tail high. Leigh paced with hands shoved in the pockets of his flight jacket, Nagra recorder slung over his shoulder. Daniel swung his arms, leather patches flashing on the elbows of his sport jacket. Daniel was a big man, barrel-chested. When they stopped to wait for a light and Leigh turned back to face Daniel, she could no longer see Leigh at all through Daniel’s solid wall of back.