Vida (35 page)

“Those are for Natalie, right? Listen, she’ll love them.”

“I know it’s bourgeois” Jimmy teetered on one foot, a stork with ulcers. “Don’t say anything about it upstairs, okay?”

“Not a word. I think it’s pretty, and American middle-class people hardly every bring each other flowers”

“I thought she might need cheering up.”

She peered closely at Jimmy, exactly her height and probably weighing no more. “Cheering up from what, exactly?”

“Well. Daniel. That stuff!’

She put an arm to stop Jimmy. “What about Daniel?”

“Didn’t she tell you?”

“We had a pretty heavy conversation about priorities” She put her hand under his chin and gently turned him to her with his light brown eyes behind the aviator glasses. “I’m getting worried about her politics, Jimmy. We need to work on her. What didn’t she tell me?”

“You know. Daniel’s … well, he’s having an affair with a student”

“I imagine so … You mean he never did?”

“A one-night stand or something casual” Jimmy said awkwardly. Sexual slang came lumpy to his tongue. He was the only person she knew who said “fuck” with tongs if he said it at all. You could feel his effort to shape common sexual words. “But not seriously. Daniel says he’s in love.”

“Does Natalie like her? … Is Natty upset?”

“Sure,” Jimmy said looking miserable. “But nobody gives her any support. It’s all Smash monogamy”“

She felt a stab of jealousy that Natalie had told Jimmy, not her. Probably Natalie feared she would support Daniel and tell her to dissolve her marriage. She did think Natalie would be better off without Daniel, who was obviously holding her back politically. He was a mushy liberal, a self-styled socialist who was always talking about losing the masses by taking too left a line, without caring to do any mass work himself. Daniel and Oscar. Let them camp out on Long Island and lecture the sea gulls, who would shit on their heads. They had become irrelevant. History moved too fast for academics.

The moment she walked into her apartment, she felt Kevin’s presence. She could not have said how. They were strongly attuned to each other; or at any rate, she was attuned to him. She chopped and browned the onions, pretending she did not know he was waiting for her. The door Lohania’s room off the kitchen was shut, but she could hear voices inside. Finally she added a bay leaf and thyme and stuck the pot roast back into the oven.

Slowly she walked into her own room. The apartment was a mess that she tried not to notice. She willed herself not to observe the sleeping bags strewn around the living room, the piles of pamphlets and cans for spray painting, the stencils, the molding towels and overflowing ashtrays. If the apartment was going to serve as a barracks, she began to understand the military insistence on neatness: she would like them to go under barracks discipline and each soldier clean his own damned space. She did not even know how many people were staying in the apartment that week, as the number varied and extra sleepers turned up snoring underfoot in the mornings.

Kevin, Jimmy, Leigh, Lohania, and Vida were living here, although Lohania hung on to her job and her room in New Jersey. Only Leigh still had a room to himself. Nobody else could claim more than the space they slept in. When people had begun to borrowing his equipment and taking cassettes and tapes, Leigh had put a padlock on his door and locked it when he was out. He had tacked on his padlocked door a notice saying he would throw anybody out the window who attempted to saw through the lock or jimmy it. Lohania still slept in what had been her bedroom, but now it was the lab, and it too was kept locked. Every member of The Little Red Wagon had a key, but Leigh did not. Often Jimmy slept there, on the floor under the workbench he had built. In that room right now a box sat of electrical blasting caps that Kevin and Lohania had swiped from a construction site in Newark. There were also several alarm clocks, insulated wires, crimpers, and batteries. What wasn’t there—yet—was dynamite.

Somehow the rent on the apartment got paid every month, but she was no longer sure how. Only Leigh and Lohania were working, although money came to the rest of them through the largess of friends and through donations. None of them had the leisure to hold a job.

Kevin was sitting in bed naked with the sheet pulled up to his waist, smoking a joint. “Where’ve you been, damn you?”

“Getting some stuff for supper and putting it on”

“Don’t play the good housewife with me. Save it for Micro.” His new name for Leigh. “I’ll eat beans out of a can … Only one thing I feel like eating and that’s pussy. Get your clothes off”

“Where’s Lohania?”

“In her room.”

“I heard voices. Who’s there?”

“Dolpho.” Kevin grinned. “Get your clothes off, I said”

Slowly she took her clothes off. “How come with Randy?”

“In the front way, I guess. Hey, no bra. I thought so. I dig that, I thought so when you came walking in.”

“But why is Randy in her room?” She did not like it. Lohania did not want Randy. Lohania rarely wanted to have sex even with Leigh or Kevin. Last fall after Lohania had gotten pregnant in spite of the coil, she and Lohania had flown to Puerto Rico together for her abortion. Lohania had been upset by Puerto Rico—the poverty, the destruction of the land and of the people—yet she was excited to be in a place where everybody except tourists and rich people spoke Spanish. She had early memories of Cuba, and the landscape was the same and different, the same and different.

Vida had gotten pregnant about a year after she married Leigh. He had been strongly against having a baby; Vida had been balanced in desires. The job she had was no career, and she was politically involved but not yet consumed. That was before she had joined the Steering Committee, when she had been a member-at-large of Students Against the War—a little awkward because she was no longer a student, but drawn to them because they were the liveliest and fastest-growing of the antiwar organizations. She had almost thought of the baby as dues to Ruby, who had plenty of grandchildren but doted on them all.

Her abortion had been one of the usual illegal hasty jobs in a doctor’s office with no anesthetic and no recourse from the later bleeding and pain, but she had borne it stoically and missed only a day from work (“I have a bad toothache and I have to go to the dentist”). Leigh had gone with her, waiting outside, and he had done what he could that night as she cried, not only for the pain but for the furtiveness of it, the coldness.

Lohania’s abortion had been harder and the aftermath much more intense and protracted. Sex hurt her, and even when it stopped hurting, she did not feel pleasure. She did not want to be touched; she brooded on the injury to her body from the coil and the removal of the coil and the embryo taken from her with the coil embedded in it, the baby that could never have reached term. The pill Lohania refused to take, the diaphragm she said hurt her, leaving Leigh or Kevin to use a condom. Vida and Natalie had had an argument, because Vida felt Lohania was simply saying she did not want contact, she wanted the skin of the condom between her and any prick. Natalie rejected that interpretation, saying the pill caused blood clots, DES caused cancer, the coil did internal damage, and why shouldn’t Lohania make the men worry about contraception? Natalie was on Lohania’s side.

Lohania’s sexual withdrawal had heated up the relationship between Vida and Kevin, and even as she fell headlong into it, she regretted Lohania’s defection. She felt abandoned to Kevin—his drive, his rage, his energy, his power. She experienced him as pure energy. Now he summoned her and she fought a delaying action. “Why is she with Randy?”

“We’re running a number on him. He’s the hardest-working stiff in our cell. He got the plans, he taught us about munitions, he’s getting the dynamite. He takes half the risks on himself. And we flaunt it in front of him. We got to share.”

“We share food. Money. Danger. But Lohania is not a
thing.
She’s not some resource. Why don’t you lend him your asshole if he’s so horny?”

“We had a struggle about it after you left. Lohania agreed”

She paced naked, holding herself over her breasts. “For more martyrdom. To humiliate her own body.”

“He’s a great guy. You ought to want to be nice to him.”

“You too. Get down and suck his cock yourself.”

Kevin grinned, not at all annoyed. “Come here, carrot cunt. I like it when you talk back. Let me give it to you.”

He pulled her down on the bed, spread her legs roughly and stuck his hairy head between them. His lips and, tongue felt good, and she sighed but her mind was ice and with Lohania. She did not want to be in bed with Kevin; she wanted to be stopping Randy from blackmailing Lohania into having sex with him. Off her kitchen it was happening. She must protect Lohania better. How fiercely close they had been in Puerto Rico. As the anesthetic was wearing off, she had held Lohania’s slim dark hand. Long, elegant fingers tipped with silver polish. Lohania was the only woman in the New York movement who wore nail polish. If she had looked whiter she would never have got away with it. On her dresser stood bottles in ranks of Blue Jean Baby, Shanghai Express, Plum Passion and Cafe au Lay.

“Davey, suck my cock and then if you’re good, I’ll stick it in you”

She hated the way he talked to her in bed; it infuriated her and underlined her submission. The tang of humiliation fed the sense of being lost in him. It was as if he said to her, I’m coarse, I’m rotten, I’m powerful and I’m strong enough to make you take it. He was fatally attractive lying on his back with a big grin, all the long lean hard-muscled planes of him spare and perfect and his prick standing out of the golden wiry pubic hairs so like his beard. He was not circumcised, and his foreskin fascinated her. He was the first man she had slept with who was not circumcised, although her father had not been. She had an impression of overhearing a fight between Ruby and Tom that centered around whether he washed or did not wash his prick enough and whether that was or wasn’t what had given Ruby an infection. The walls of their house were thin as toilet paper.

The uncircumcised man was doubly not Jewish. She had listed to and fro in her life from Jew to goy and back, just like Ruby. Now she was completely hung up on Kevin; hung up as on a long hook that penetrated her through the breasts. When he touched her, she burned. She could not separate her raw sore craving for him from her desperation, from the war that raged in and out and around them. They were comrades in arms. Little tenderness, less gentleness, no playfulness passed between them, and they failed to spin a web of the small social acts and domestic pleasures that had defined much of her loving with Leigh which often, terrifyingly, felt over. It was as if the sharp blade that was Kevin had come literally between them and she could no longer feel Leigh. They fought too much.

When Kevin was thrusting high and hard into her, she stopped thinking, she stopped feeling anything except his weight and his violence and his need and his pleasure. Her coming was more emotional than physical. She felt like weeping. Since Lohania had stopped sleeping with him oftener than every week or so, they had sex at least once a day and sometimes twice. Often she was sore from him; yet she felt impelled. His touch aroused her even when she could expect and indeed desired no orgasm. This is real, she thought under him. The sense of compulsion convinced her.

Afterward they lay spent and wet. The windows were shoved up, letting the traffic concatenation of Broadway roar dully in the room. The curtains hung soiled and limp. The day was close to hot. It gave menacing promises of a long hot burning summer stinking of tar and tear gas. Weary, she slid down almost into sleep. Kevin was smoking, flicking the ashes into the sheet. He was not even conscious of making a mess. So unlike Leigh, fussy about everything, noticing every wrinkle. Once she had admired that concern with detail; now it felt petty and harassing. Who cared? Kevin’s raging sharp beautiful contempt made Leigh stuffy and tame.

Against Kevin she dozed, his long sinewy arm around her. His gaunt profile etched against the window relaxed as he exhaled smoke rings to the ceiling, where dark red paint ran in a crazy pattern from an afternoon Kevin had got angry and spray-painted it in a random design from the hip, shouting, “Fuck your goddamned room, who are you to occupy so much space? It’s my room too. We don’t have any privacy. We’re soldiers. No more private rooms and private property!”

Exhaustion rose, thick warm fog in her veins. How tired she was; how tired she always was. Fatigue made her feel guilty, so she drove herself harder … She was packing. They had to leave. Smoke seeped from under the door. The living room was burning. The draperies were in flames. She was packing so that they could escape. She had to remember to pack everything they needed, because the fire would burn everything else, but always she kept forgetting things. Her good winter coat. Leigh’s tapes and cassettes. His best Nagra. Her Cretan tapestry. Mopsy. She had forgotten Mopsy. She felt such a jolt of guilt it was as if she had been kicked in the stomach. Mopsy. Where was Mopsy in the smoke? She could hear her barking.

The walls fell in, fell onto her. She was suffocating, and the flames bit her arms and back, the flames scorched her face and eyes. She heard her own hair crackling into flames, and still she tried to cram Leigh’s mother’s antique lace tablecloth into the suitcase … Mopsy was barking. Lohania walked in, Mopsy at her heels. For a moment Vida was terrified, seeing the room still flickering with black-and-orange flames. “Knock, man” Kevin said, “unless you be wanting some too.”