Vida (37 page)

“There’s just us,” Jimmy said shyly. “Everybody else has gone to be on that hospital picket line.” Jimmy was uneasy around Leigh because he had used to worship him, but had changed his devotion to Kevin and lately to Randy. Jimmy had been doing power-structure research on the oil companies. Leigh had met him when he was covering a demonstration at Con Edison on 14th Street and brought him home to share with the family an awkward bumbling, undernourished genius who lived only for the moment and was fresh and ingenuous as a five-foot-six daisy. After a month, Jimmy had moved in. He needed a lot of loving, a lot of tending to flourish. But gradually Jimmy had come to feel that his brains, his ability to research a way through the labyrinthine maneuvers and institutions the ruling class has invented to obfuscate itself were pointless compared with Kevin’s ability to act.

“Oh, the meat’s delicious!” Karen said in obvious surprise as she tasted her food at the table. “Who did the cooking?”

”I did” Vida said dryly.
“New Day.
I’ve seen that. It has left pretensions but carries ads for Coke and RCA and Polaroid. The text says try something new and the ads say buy something new.”

“If we supported it on subscriptions, it would cost five dollars an issue. A bit prohibitive, wouldn’t you say?” Karen smiled at Leigh.

“No point doing research on the corporations if only people already in the Movement read it, is there?” Leigh said expansively.

“The fiddler fiddles, the boxer boxes and the intellectual puts out words.” Kevin scratched himself inside his shirt. He did not itch, but did it to annoy. He never scratched himself when those he judged to be the bourgeoisie were absent. He put both elbows on the table and ate with his head down, acting the slob, swilling wine with loud smacks of his lips.

“How does anybody know what to attack? Because intellectual labor’s been done naming names, naming corporations, fitting the links together. Marx didn’t spend his time breaking windows. He spent it in the British Museum.”

Lohania roused herself from her visible funk. “He didn’t advise
us
to spend our lives there. Theory without practice is masturbation.”

“And blind practice is a hole in the head. Why work at being stupid? It comes to some of us easily enough” Leigh snapped.

The argument had been going on for a year, Vida thought, eating her supper without pleasure. The parts of her life clanked like a machine needing oiling, whose parts no longer fitted. Never had any other woman she knew been blackmailed into sex in that nasty way Lohania had that afternoon. At least, Leigh would never have abetted that as Kevin had.

Jimmy and Kevin got up from the table to go to the Bronx. Vida caught Lohania in the kitchen. “Stay. Let’s talk. They ganged up on you today.”

Lohania gave her a tight wan smile, lifting her small chin. “Eh, what’s the use talking about it? If I think too much, I get depressed. Better to go out and do something real … We’ll show
him
what women can do”

“Aren’t you coming with us?” Jimmy asked Vida as Lohania slung her jacket over her shoulder and followed Kevin out.

“No. I better work on the plans.”

That was the only answer that would work. She could not say that she had been to so many demonstrations and pickets in the last month that marching had become meaningless, leaving her with a desperate need to be alone. Loose ends welled up inside her. She felt too coerced by the group to know what she wanted or felt any longer.

Besides, she hoped that if Leigh saw she was going to stay alone in the apartment, he might get rid of the Seventh Sister and spend some time with her. He was stuck in an earlier phase of mobilization. He still thought that fighting the state could be assimilated into a comfortable existence—going to a job every day, going to the dentist twice a year, breakfast in bed and late suppers with the two of them snacking on sable on black bread or rich duck pate from Zabar’s.

As with Daniel, as with Oscar, his conscience permitted him little luxuries she had had to give up, and the tension between them sang through the air of the apartment like an air conditioner that ran all of time with a flaw in its moving parts. She woke in the morning already haggard after four hours’ sleep, her body raw, her mind sore, her nerves stripped, and she felt a stab of guilt that she was still living. So many had died that to be alive required that the stub of life be used to best advantage. She was a tool. A fighting machine, Kevin called himself. That was what she ought to be. Then why was she lying on her bed flat on her back staring at the ceiling Kevin had spoiled with paint, fighting resentment that the ugly dark red doodles made her feel aesthetically attacked?

I must try to be simpler. If I were a real revolutionary I wouldn’t see the paint on the ceiling. Maybe Lohania doesn’t want sex in her life because she wants to strip down to the bone. Maybe she’s found a way to greater simplicity. Renouncing sexuality felt tremendously appealing to her as she glanced at the wreckage of her once cozy bedroom.

When she had met Leigh, she had judged him far more political than herself and had admired him passionately. But he remained safely ensconced in his profession. She thought of Kevin imitating Leigh at a demonstration: “And I say, when the club descends on your head, how do you feel, could you tell us now for our listening public?” It was true: he came to record, to interview, to report. He had his press pass. While he had been roughed up now and then, he had never been arrested and never really beaten. Of course, someone had to cover the demonstrations; yet covering them kept him outside the fray. He did not change as they changed, who had more on the line. Now he was news director of the listener-owned station. He was famous in the Movement in New York and beyond. Last month he had sat on a panel on advocacy Journalism at N.Y.U. Leigh’s work made him more respectable as he covered their work, which drove them farther and farther outside the hedges of legality.

But part of her missed him all of the time every day and night. She was lonely in a way she hardly had time to notice. All along her side where she had grown used to a friendly warm body, to companionship, to give-and take and good discussion, she was naked. She had not felt so deeply and constantly lonely in the midst of chaos since Greece. She did not feel loved.

Leigh was angry with her, too, and she felt guilty, as if she had let him down by getting too involved with Kevin. But she was angry at his anger too: he was punishing her for taking their mutual ideas too passionately and too far. He ought to try to change with her. Soon she would set between Leigh and herself an act that she could never tell him. Once done, no undoing. She mistrusted all decisions lately, because stopping to think, to weigh alternatives seemed fused with cowardice. Thinking itself was suspect, for it was the liberal rational heroes who had created this war. She had never kept anything from Leigh except other people’s secrets. She would not tell him about Lark’s leg or Oscar’s occasional impotence; but she told him honestly what she did and felt. She was not permitted to talk to him about The Little Red Wagon, but that silence was becoming a lie.

Unable to rest, she went to her vanity. In the long May twilight, her hair shone crackling around the brush. For the first time in weeks she sat down at her vanity, pushed aside the litter of pamphlets and marking pens to put on a dab of Madame Rochas, her favorite perfume that Leigh gave her every birthday, even this year. Then she drew lines with the eyebrow pencil over and under her green eyes to set them off. She dabbed on a light coat of makeup from a bottle drying up from disuse. Then, as a last concession, she put on a pale green minidress she had always thought of as her doll’s dress. It was simply cut, falling from the yoke like the dresses Ruby had run off on her machine for Vida’s two dolls, Betsy and Marilyn. For a moment, she inhaled Ruby’s scent: a little sweat (she did not use deodorant, believing it caused cancer), an inexpensive flowery perfume, violet or lily-of-the-valley, cinnamon, onions, ginger, all blended into Mama-smell. She wanted to rest against Ruby and weep. And sleep.

Slowly she strolled toward the light and voices. She had only the time when everybody was gone. Kevin would break up her little game, if he got back too early. Leigh and Karen were sitting at the round dining-room table, where Karen had spread out photographs she was showing him. The Greek saddlebag purse yawned on the table, so that Vida could see it held two cameras and an assortment of lenses. Mopsy had come out of Leigh’s room, where she had been spending a lot of time sleeping on his bed, and sat tight against his thigh, trying to get attention. Occasionally he rumpled her ears with a casual hand.

“Actually, that was Kenya,” Karen was saying in that high cooing voice. “That’s a Masai village. Those boys are all warriors.”

As Vida walked into the circle of light, their unfriendly faces rose from the photographs in one motion. “Hi,” Leigh said. “Thought you’d gone.”

“No. Everybody else is off to the picket line in the Bronx”

“What’d you think of the coverage we gave that tonight?”

She debated whether to admit not hearing his show. “Actually, the news about Kent State shook me up so much, I don’t remember anything else.”

“I have a theory about that” he said to Karen. “When you come on with a blockbuster story, you might as well shut up then. Nobody listens. I’m going to try working up to big stories.”

Karen laughed in a high tinkly burst. “Like those old-fashioned British papers that used to have lost doggies on the first page and The Queen Assassinated on page twenty?”

“Somebody bombed Dow Chemical with an incendiary bomb at dawn in Rockefeller Center,” he said. “Not unlike napalm, although nobody was there. But they must feel like their products are coming home.”

“How awfully clever,” Karen said. “It’s all very Robin Hood, all these merry bands blowing up a different corporate office every night. The insurance companies must be ticked.”

If you think it’s so cute, you can both come along. Look at me, damn you, she addressed Leigh silently. How can you dote on that caricature? She strolled to the window to push it up. “Warm tonight.” Mopsy came to her, grateful for the moment’s attention. Every time she looked at Mopsy lately she felt guilty. Now she felt united with her dog in trying to capture Leigh’s attention. He did look at her as she raised the window, the dress rising on her long legs. “Where are you going all dressed up?”

“No place. I thought I’d run down and get some cold beer at the Dominican grocery. Then I thought I’d just take a night off and hang out here and read. Take a long bath. Relax.” How seductive can I be, with her glued to him?

“They have that Mexican beer I like, Dos Equis.”

“I’ll get a six-pack” She could not continue watching them look at Karen’s photographs. Maybe if she went down for the beer, Leigh would catch the hint and get rid of Karen. She could not remember the last time they had been alone together in the apartment. “Come on, Mopsy, old girl” she said gently. Mopsy forgave her with passionate wriggles and bounced after her to the door.

But when she came up, having for once properly curbed Mopsy and given her a little run, the light was still on in the dining room as she put the beer away, but only the photographs remained on the table. She rifled them briefly. Aesthetic poses of the picturesque Third World. How would you like it, Karen baby, if some photographer from Kenya marched into your kitchen and your bathroom and snapped photos of you at your colorful native pursuits? American woman wearing hair dryer. American woman at appendage-coloring rite. American man shortening grass in ritual area.

Resisting an urge to throw Karen’s photographs out the window to snow as confetti on Broadway, she walked slowly back toward her room. Mopsy’s claws ticked on the floor behind her, wet nose against her dangling palm. The lights were on in Leigh’s room, and she could hear music from within but the door had been shut in her face. Leigh was always on his private enlisted phone, chatting, flirting, arranging interviews, part work and part play and part seduction, and for a moment she listened, hoping. She heard Karen’s tinkly laugh and did not hope any longer.

She slammed the bedroom door, tore off the dress and flung it on the floor. In the heat of the stuffy night her teeth chattered. Her bed was filthy. Roughly she yanked the used sheets off and rummaged in the hall closet for clean ones. Did nobody ever do the laundry? That was how she was going to end up spending her stolen night: doing the laundry in the basement with Mopsy for company while Leigh screwed that simp. She lay on the stripped bed with her face against Mopsy’s warm flank trying to make herself move. She was glad when the phone rang, and she went to answer it and heard Lark’s voice.

“Listen, Asch, get down here. Am I glad I caught you! We’re having an emergency meeting of the Steering Committee. We have to respond to the shootings.”

“When?”

“Right now. Pelican just went up to the Bronx to pull our staff off the picket line. We have to get on the streets fast.”

“I’ll be right down.” She hung up to step into her jeans and yank on her T-shirt. With great pleasure she banged on Leigh’s door. “So long,” she yelled. “The Steering Committee of New York SAW is meeting. We’re going to knock through a TDA for Kent State. Tell everybody where I am. And have a ball!”

The hell with him. On impulse she dashed into the dining room grabbed a photo and wrote a note to her roommates in purple marking pen on the back of it, then stuck it near the door where they’d see it. A little vandalism for the Vassarette she hoped would give him syphilis. “No, Mopsy, stay! Stay, girl.” Maybe he’d like a job with
New Day
too. Off to greener pastures.