Vida (44 page)

“You didn’t tell me you were seeing Leigh. You told me you had some kind of meeting. Then you tell everybody you saw Leigh and he told you blah blah blah. Why did you lie to me like that?”

”It wasn’t
lying”
She was clenching the wheel too hard, treading on the accelerator. She forced herself to draw breath deeply, to sit back in the seat. Her neck ached. “It’s dangerous to go around telling people who we see. You don’t have to know I see Leigh. Knowing jeopardizes him without doing you any good.”

“I don’t have to know? Bullshit. What else don’t I have to know? Who else do you see that I don’t know about? How many lovers do you meet?”

“None, you asshole. I’m with you just about all the time!”

“That’s where you got the money, isn’t it? We spent all our money on the car and then you had sixty bucks. He gave it to you!”

“Why shouldn’t he give me money? He makes a good salary. He’s comfortable.” She tried not to sound bitter.

“Services rendered. Does he know the money went to me, too?”

“He doesn’t know about you. Why should I risk telling him? He has no need to know.”

“I’d like to confront him. I’d like to meet him. The next time you have a rendezvous with him, I’m going along.”

“No!”

“Why? So you can fuck him?”

“Why shouldn’t I? I was making love with Leigh before I ever met you. In 1965 when you were in junior high, I was living with him. Come off it, Joel. He’s been important to me.’”

“More important than me?”

“I’m with you. I’m not with him. He’s living with another woman, Susannah.”

“Does she know about you?”

“No. And I don’t want her to.”

“So you do fuck him?”

“Sometimes. Of course”

“Why? How can you do that with him?”

“How could I not? I still care about him. There’s a connection between us”

“If you love him and you want to be with him, what are you doing with me? Just because I’m available”

“I love you. You know that!”

“I don’t know what you mean by love. I don’t think you mean very much.”

“I think I love you a lot! I think I’m good for you! Not like Kiley, who didn’t give a damn about you and wouldn’t fuck you and made you feel like a clod. That’s what you like. I bet you didn’t give her a hard time.”

”Hey, a pig pulling out. How fast are you going?”

“Oh, god!” Her foot instantly came up off the accelerator and gently pressed the brake. “Over. I think about sixty, sixty-two.”

The cop did not turn on his lights but drove just behind them. She was going 51 now and she slowed to 50 just in case there was a discrepancy between their speedometers. Right on her tail he sat. Her hands slid on the wheel with sweat.

“If he doesn’t bust us, I’m taking over the driving”

“Fine. My neck aches … But baby, you shouldn’t start on me that way when I’m driving.”

“Oh, what am I supposed to do in the car? Make conversation about the weather? Discuss Mao
On Contradictions?”

The cop tailed them and she drove sedately, sweating. How had she been so careless? How had she let herself speed? She could spend the rest of her life in prison for getting excited during a fight. His vast rotten jealousy, it would end up killing them both. On they went, on and on together, the cop stuck to their rear bumper. She had trouble believing in his jealousy, that he could not simply stop that nonsense. That it was not somehow put on. Could he not simply observe to himself that he was attracted to her because she was who she was and that involved a sharp appetite for others? What was the cop doing, anyhow?

Then a car came up from behind in the outside lane, driving much faster. As it caught up to the cop and saw him, it hit the brakes and fell off back, but the cop put on his lights, the beacon on the roof slashing its beam. Her heart lurched. He pulled over the second car. She could not stop staring in the rearview mirror to see if he was going to pull her over, too. Joel was squinting at the map with the aid of a pocket flash. “If we can just get two miles up the road, we can get off. Drive into town. Maybe something will be open.” Slowly she drove on, afraid to speed up, watching the rearview mirror more carefully and more often than the road.

“That’s the junction,” Joel said. “Hang a right. Then pull over and let me drive.”

“With pleasure” The energy of fear was ebbing along her veins, leaving her sick with fatigue. Besides longing for sleep, she was hungry. A sandwich, a cup of coffee and she could hold out. “That was close” she said.

16

Joel and Vida camped at night in the back room of Madame Florian’s Couture. It was fine and private among the stock of dresses, but they had to clear out before the store opened and return just at closing. This morning when they stumbled out, a wet snow rushed horizontally off Lake Michigan, sandblasting their faces as they tried to walk. As soon as the Art Institute opened, they went in to get warm.

They used the rest rooms, located the pay phones, and then Vida selected a room with American surrealist paintings of the ‘30s she felt were underrated. They were good company, and the room did not receive heavy traffic. She sat down on a bench and blew her nose. “I’m coming down with a cold,” she said to Joel.

“I better go rip off some Vitamin C.”

“Don’t. Buy it. Don’t take unnecessary chances. If you tell the guard you’re coming back, they’ll let you in without charging you again.”

“Don’t get sick, it’ll be awful.”

She smiled at him. “I can’t get sick. Where would I have to be sick? The alley?”

“I’ll be right back with the Vitamin C. Maybe I’ll get some B vitamins, too.”

“See how expensive they are.” Crossing the country in the old car, getting the tire fixed, the terminal replaced, paying out for gas and more gas had left them strapped. After he left she tried to work on her essay, but her head felt heavy. Blood pressed on the backs of her eyes. She was tired from the trip, tired of traveling. Since the week and a half on Cape Cod, they had never stayed anyplace. If only they could establish a base, settle in for the rest of the winter. Maybe she’d volunteer as printer-in-training to Marti to stay put in Vermont for a while. She wanted to have a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom with her towels hung in it, a closet with her clothes on hangers, food in the refrigerator and food in the cupboard.

Every night she would lie in Joel’s arms. In the morning she would put on fresh-ground coffee. With her pots and pans and sauces she would make love to him, and he would cause everything in the old house to work smoothly; pumps and furnaces and all finicky machines would purr for him like cats. She did not want to move them into Hardscrabble Hill, that was the truth; she wanted a place of their own—apartment, house, cottage, ski cabin, trailer.

At the archway into the hall she caught sight of Sam peering in. With elaborate caution, he sauntered in but then lost his cool and grinned at her. Oh, he had Natalie’s big grin exactly, although he was already a head taller than his mother. “Sam,” she cried, “you’re bigger than ever. You’ve grown a whole foot!”

“Two inches,” he said. “I grow an inch a month now.”

“You have to stop.” She kissed him.

Sam blushed. That embarrassed him more, and he glared at the nearest painting. “What’s that supposed to be?”

“I think of it as capitalism, myself” She could not take her hand off his shoulder. She knew she had to. “But where’s my sister?”

“‘Your sister’ is downstairs” Sam said gravely, recovering his composure. It was necessary for him to remain calm; he was at the age when surface composure was more important than almost anything and harder to achieve than A’s or orgasms. “She sent me to find you. She didn’t want to run all over looking”

“How come she’s so lazy?”

“She never likes to climb stairs. You know. It’s her knee.”

She pulled Sam back. “What’s wrong with her knee?”

“Remember, since she was pushed down the steps at Columbia? Her knee hurts in cold weather … She’s got a touch of arthritis,” Sam said confidentially and importantly, leaning toward her. He was repeating somebody’s words: “a touch of arthritis” “But she won’t admit it. She says it’s just stiff!’

“That’s not good,” she said. “I’ll speak to her. Has she seen a doctor?”

“Mama? You know better than that! She never goes for herself. If I have a sore finger, it’s off to the doctor. If she has a sore finger, it’s what do they know? And she doesn’t go.”

Did he really appreciate his mother? She was half envious of him. At the same time she was struck by how much the pattern he described was Ruby’s too. Ruby thought of herself as the strongest, able to endure, but the rest of the family she fussed over. “Sam, will you grow up as wonderful as you are? Promise me you will.”

“Oh, I get better every year.” He was grinning again. “She says I do, and she ought to know. I can see it with Peezie. She was a real creep when she learned to giggle, but she’s human again since she won the hundred-yard sprints. She’s training all the time. She couldn’t come along because she’s running indoors in a meet.”

She tried to imagine her flesh and blood an athlete. Natalie seemed so proud of Peezie. “Maybe she’ll go to the Olympics”

“She’s not that good. But she can run pretty fast for a girl.”

Like Joel, Sam seemed more angelic than he was. “For a girl? Can you outrun her? Madame Curie discovered some neat radium—for a girl, huh?”

“You sound like … your sister. Okay, okay, she can run faster than me. You want me to get Mama?”

“Please. Right away.”

As soon as he left, she laughed at herself. Why hadn’t she gone with him instead of sitting as if she were receiving in her boudoir? She was slow today. Sam’s presence, the expectation of Natalie excited her. Now she was condemned to wait and wait while she burned a bright orange with impatience and need.

She loved Natalie more today than she had a decade before. Time and age only made Natalie rarer. Would she have cherished her as much if they had lived normal lives? If she still shared the apartment on 103rd with Leigh while Natalie lived out on the Island, they could not meet daily, but they would talk on the phone. They would talk and everything she thought she would share and Natalie would comment on every event and he said/she said and every project would be worked over in their busy mouths. That would be pleasure keener than sex, healthier than gluttony, more lasting than wine: to share your life with a sister who knows all about you and with whom you discuss and debate and dissect everything.

Natalie trotted in behind Sam. In her forest green down jacket she looked like a pigeon and walked a little stiffly on red-booted feet. Her skin seemed drawn and sallow with fatigue, even though her face was cut wide open by a beautiful grin, both Sam and Natalie like pumpkins with candles shining out through their strong ivory teeth, both their heads curly, cropped, asking to be petted and stroked.

“Where’s Joel?” Natalie looked around anxiously.

“Gone out for vitamins. He’ll be back soon” She could never say something like that without a twinge of superstitious and yet fully rational fear. Every statement of intention and probability in her life was part prayer. Let him come back soon. Let us be able to go to the hospital. Let us return safely to Madame Florian’s, who told us to call her Claire.

“Good Then we can go downstairs and have lunch.” Natalie no sooner took a look at her than she started wanting to feed her.

She did not mind. She wanted to be fed soup. She wanted taking care of. Joel and she could eat a full meal now; then after Madame’s boutique shut, they could boil an egg on the hot plate for supper. “How’s Ruby? When can I see her?”

“Still about the same. You can’t.” Natalie took her hand between her own, still cold from out-of-doors.

“Can’t what? I have to see her. They don’t have a guard posted at the hospital.”

“I wouldn’t bet. Sam and I were followed this morning … No, don’t jump, we were careful. We shook them hours ago.”

“Why are you being followed? What’s up?”

“I’m followed in East Norwich. It isn’t to learn anything, because they’re doing it openly. They stand outside staring at the house.” Sam was bouncing and weaving with the desire to speak, making little noises until Vida and Natalie turned to him. “I went outside and took pictures of them” he said, “and they chased me. One of them grabbed me and broke my Kodak. But the next time I took Dad’s Pentax and I used the telephoto lens. So I didn’t have to get real close, and I ran in the house before they caught me.”

“Wonderful, Sam.” Vida sank on her bench, too tired to stand long. “Lucky they didn’t smash Daniel’s camera.”

Natalie blew her nose. “Yeah, we may have to pawn it.”

“How come?”

“Money. He’s cut us off. We’re in the middle of a big battle over the kids, custody, the bank accounts, everything.”

“He called up and told Con Edison to cut off the electricity” Sam said. “Mom was making toast. Peezie was using the Water Pik. I was watching the
Today
show, when
bam!
It all went off. We had to get them to turn it back on!”