Vida (58 page)

“Actually, he has a light plane,” the lawyer said with a moue of amusement. “That’s how he transported the children out there. But the plane is at an airstrip fifteen miles away. It’s not a serious problem”

”Any helicopters? And how much?”

“The standard fee is fifteen hundred. My client is prepared to pay that”

“Fifteen hundred plus expenses” she said quickly, before she had a chance to react to the sum. That would save them; that would set them up high and fine for a winter of comfort. Even with the tithing to the Network, they would do just fine. Images of little houses in Vermont jogged through her head. Joel would be delighted.

“What kind of expenses did you have in mind?” The lawyer raised her eyebrow, knocking off the Scotch.

“Where is this … hunting cabin? The Arctic Circle?”

“A good guess—the hunting cabin. No, it’s in Michigan. Standard mileage or air fare plus car rental?”

“Plus twenty-five a day for each of us to cover expenses while we’re in Michigan. We could have to hang around for a week, and you know it. In the dead of winter? It won’t be easy. Twenty-five a day for two plus ten days’ car rental.”

“I’ll have to discuss your offer with my client”

“Take it or leave it. We can get the kids back for her. Tell her that.”

“I have to make a phone call.” The lawyer rose.

She sat at the table sweating. It could be a setup. She was angled to keep an eye on the door, but she swung to watch the room too. A man was looking at her, and as she caught his eye, he smiled. She looked quickly away. In her nervousness she sipped the tequila sunrise again, but was careful to stop. She could not be fuzzy. She envisioned a log hunting cabin standing on a vast snowy plain with a maniac inside stalking from window to window with a hunting rifle and a shotgun. Oh, just hooray! They had to be crazy to do it.

As the lawyer came toward her, surreptitiously she wiped her forehead. She was still a little feverish. Stay calm but wary. “What did your client say?”

“She wants a meeting set up.”

“Why?”

The lawyer elegantly raised a bony shoulder. “They’re her kids. She can’t accept the idea of somebody carrying them off who might abuse them the way she thinks he’s doing. She insists on meeting you before she gives her okay.”

“Where is she?”

“Roslyn Heights.”

I might as well move to Long Island; I’m sure economically dependent on its problems lately. “How soon can she get here?”

”She can’t. She’s at work. She would like us to come there.”

“When? It has to be settled today.”

“Why are you in such a hurry?”

“I have another project that I have to fly to the West Coast for”

“She was thinking of the weekend”

“Ask her to think again. We can meet her for supper tonight.”

“You like to eat food over decisions.”

“Right. Break bread together.” I like to be fed; that would never occur to you, would it?

The lawyer sighed. “I don’t know if I can make it … I’ll have to get her back and make a few other calls.”

Johnson was gone for twenty minutes. The bar was filling up, and the waiter asked twice if either of them was wanting another drink, even though she had her tequila sunrise barely touched before her. She sipped it, watered down with the melting ice, and ordered more cheese and crackers.

The lawyer came back, motioned to the waiter. “The bill, please. I’m running late. All right, we meet at eight in a restaurant on the North Hempstead Turnpike. That’s 25A, just after you cross Glen Cove Road, on the left. I won’t be eating with you, but I’ll be there long enough to close the negotiations or end them.” She sighed. “Now I’m in a rush.”

She paid, still standing.

“How about an advance?”

The lawyer laughed. “Advance for what? Eating crackers? You be there at eight with your partner. We agree, we’ll talk money then.”

Joel had better have the car fixed. Money, money. Desperate, she glared at her watch. Leigh left the studio every day at four unless he really was out of town, laid up, hospitalized. On his honeymoon in the Dry Tortugas. If she walked at top speed she could get there in time to catch him. Or should she wait near the apartment? No, that was even more dangerous. Midtown was marginally safer.

She strode uptown. Normally the mild walk would not have bother her, but she was weak. The strains of the day etched into her, acid eroding her strength. She did not want to force herself to this confrontation, but he was her last chance. After this, petty crime. Running coke was not what she had bent her life to do. Survival is not enough. I could die now she thought, of fatigue, of weariness, of vexation. I’m sure many have died of vexation. It breeds the carelessness that makes you step on a mine, walk into an ambush, miss surveillance. I must look where I am going.

Would Joel be able to fix the car? She saw him bending over her, carrying juice to her, sponging her face with a washcloth, rubbing her sore back. Last night they had made love, the first time she had felt well enough. She could feel his hands on her thighs … Forswear sexual reveries on Manhattan streets!

The studio was on the 50th floor of an office building and the lobby, the only reasonable place to wait, on the side where elevators from 31 to 50 came down. Let’s hope Miss Susannah isn’t meeting him. She did not dare loiter in the lobby too long. Building security men were always about in Manhattan. She stood at the candy counter skimming the magazines, trying to position herself where she could appear to look for a periodical and keep an eye on the bank of elevators. She realized she still had her
Times
crammed under her arm and discarded its mangled mass in a wastebasket. When she turned again he was exiting from the elevator, chatting to a younger man who bounced at his elbow nodding. She kept her face turned from him and then fell into step a little behind. Leigh and the younger man walked out through the double doors. She moved up behind them. She had never seen the other, and neither of them had any reason to look back.

“Well, take care, Stan. I’ll see you on Saturday.”

“Yeah, Leigh. My best to Susannah. We’ll be over at seven.”

Behind him she walked a block, keeping close but not too close. He was whistling a rock song whose words she recalled as “skin full of trouble, head like a bubble …” Slowly she moved into step beside him. “Greetings. You’ve been too busy to make our appointments.”

He jumped, flinching, and whitened over his beard. “What in hell are you doing here?”

“Hitting you for money. I need it. I’m in some trouble”

“I’d guess so. With Kevin . . He censored himself. “Your sister’s locked up tight, you know.”

“I plan to get out of town tonight, but I haven’t the money to leave”

“Er … have you had a chance to talk to Natalie at all?”

“Congratulations, you mean?” She sounded tight as a drum. What did she feel? Pain and anger with exhaustion over it all in a numb layer like blubber in a mammal that must make its living from the Arctic seas. Inside, the hot blood boiled far below. “Name it for me, and I guess you’re doing what you want, hey, Leigh? Only I expect you to keep our appointments.”

He rocked on a boot heel. “What’s going on—some kind of black mail? Showing up like this.”

“Don’t be an asshole. It’s me that’s in danger. I’m only here because you weren’t on your end of the phone calls”

”I can’t go on paying you. You seem to know I’m married and Susannah’s having a baby. She’ll have to quit her job in June.”

“New commitments do not cancel old commitments.”

“Face it, damn it, I’m married.”

“Quite. For all you know, so am I. But you owe me, Leigh.”

“For how long?”

“For how long I continue to fight. You get paid for your work. If we’re on the same side, I’m entitled to be paid for mine.”

“How am I supposed to give you money on the sly? I can’t sneak off to see you any longer.”

“I’ll give you a contact you’ll pay. You can call it professional expenses, paying an informant, booze money, dope money, anything you want. But I’m not evaporating because you got bored with clandestine rendezvous. You don’t ever have to see me, but you have an obligation.”

“I didn’t say I don’t want to see you. I never said that!”

“Give the money to Oscar. Eighty a month.”

“I can’t hack that, Vinnie. I just can’t.”

“Fifty, then. I think you can afford it.” She smiled. “Call it alimony”

“I knew you’d be pissed.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me face to face?”

“When?”

“Leigh, there was time to discuss your program, time to talk politics, time to walk in the snow, time to fuck. But no time to be honest.”

“Are
you
honest? You just said you might be married”

“What have you asked me the last year? You act as if you don’t want to know, Leigh.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Rather watch it on the television some night?”

“You’re getting nasty … Suppose I do give Oscar fifty a month. For how long?”

“How long will I be under?”

“Look, it isn’t as if I begged you to go underground. It isn’t as if I was involved in that harebrained scheme.”

“We were all involved. You had limits. You were a professional journalist. You could say to yourself, I have to stop at such and so or I’ll lose my job. What was my profession? Fighting the war. Making a revolution, Where was I to stop? At death? We each carried out our duties, but the wages have been different”

“Is that how you really see it?”

”Isn’t that how you see it?”

“I’ll pass Oscar fifty a month” Leigh glanced pointedly at his watch. “Oscar? How is he mixed up in this?”

“As an old friend, not as fickle as you. I need cash
now,
bad, whatever you have.”

“What am I supposed to do, pretend I got my pocket picked? I don’t go around with a fortune in my wallet.”

“You seldom have less than a hundred. It’s your habit. I do remember your habits.”

Grimacing in his beard, he peeled off two twenties and a ten. “That’s your fifty this month. That’s all I got, and I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

“Sell some of our furniture”

“Aw, come on. Susannah redecorated the living room in the fall. She bought out Bloomingdale’s. She didn’t like the old stuff”‘

“My red Cretan hanging. Where is it? Give it to Oscar. I don’t want it over your bed.”

“Christ, Vi … nnie, Susannah took that down ages ago.”

“Where is it?”

“How would I know? I remember her sending it to the cleaner’s.”

“You give that to Oscar. I’d rather have it over his bed” Beginning to cry, she turned and charged blindly along the crowded sidewalk, bumping passersby, heading west automatically. Roughly she scrubbed her hand across her eyes. She could not afford tears; tears blinded. She had humiliated herself for what? Fifty dollars would hardly get them to the Vermont meeting of the Board. Perhaps this encounter was like scrubbing out an infected sore with strong lye soap, or the iodine that Ruby had always favored: it hurts because it’s helping you. It burns because it’s killing the germs. The infection. Leigh had become an infection. Burn it out.

She felt like a fool marching to the subway, fever rising in her forehead, her body heavy with fatigue. Joel thought she loved carelessly and casually; he did not see she loved too long and too well. She did not know when to give up, but stuck to a bad bargain. She could try men, taste them, feint, withdraw, but once she had begun to love someone, she let him into her own space, her center, and could not easily pry him out. Endings were bitter to her. Why not? They were deaths. Leigh was dead to her. He had become a fifty-dollar-a-month annuity. Nothing more. She trudged into the subway mouth with the rush-hour crowd.

20

Joel and Vida met the lawyer’s client Mrs. Richter, a square-built woman of Vida’s age with big bones, a little voice and a perpetual crease of worry between her soft brown eyes. Joel charmed her, and she agreed before dessert to hire them. They were supposed to appear to do the job within ten days. Vida figured that that gave her enough time to attend the Board meeting, launch her antinuke project if she could steer it through the Board and get back to pick up the advance.

At her mail drop in New York she found a notice from her lawyer about the divorce, a note from Leigh and one from Eva. The note from Leigh went:

December 7

Baby, You caught me by surprise and we both said things we don’t mean. You know I still love you. Remember New Hampshire. I’ll be expecting a call Tuesday at the old numbers. Be seeing you.

Love, Leigh

She read it, reread it and tore it in little bits. She would not call. Oscar was amused at his role of go-between and would provide any link with Leigh that might prove necessary, besides what she hoped would be the regular flow of that small amount of money. Eva’s note said she was on her way East for the Board meeting and was stopping to chat and politic along the way. She would like to meet Vida early and suggested Rochester: